at of her brow. For all that it represented she had
given service threefold. If ever there came a time when that hunger for
independence which had been fanned to a flame in her brother's kitchen
should demand appeasement--she pulled herself up short when she found
her mind running upon such an eventuality. Her future was ordered. She
was married--to be a mother. Here lay her home. All about her ties were
in process of formation, ties that with time would grow stronger than
any shackles of steel, constraining her to walk in certain ways,--ways
that were pleasant enough, certain of ease if not of definite purpose.

Yet now and then she found herself falling into fits of abstraction in
which Roaring Lake and Jack Fyfe, all that meant anything to her now,
faded into the background, and she saw herself playing a lone hand
against the world, making her individual struggle to be something more
than the petted companion of a dominant male and the mother of his
children. She never quite lost sight of the fact that marriage had been
the last resort, that in effect she had taken the avenue her personal
charm afforded to escape drudgery and isolation. There was still
deep-rooted in her a craving for something bigger than mere ease of
living. She knew as well as she knew anything that in the natural
evolution of things marriage and motherhood should have been the big
thing in her life. And it was not. It was too incidental, too
incomplete, too much like a mere breathing-place on life's highway.
Sometimes she reasoned with herself bluntly, instead of dreaming, was
driven to look facts in the eye because she did dream. Always she
encountered the same obstacle, a feeling that she had been defrauded,
robbed of something vital; she had forgone that wonderful, passionate
drawing together which makes the separate lives of the man and woman who
experiences it so fuse that in the truest sense of the word they become
one.

Mostly she kept her mind from that disturbing introspection, because
invariably it led her to vague dreaming of a future which she told
herself--sometimes wistfully--could never be realized. She had shut the
door on many things, it seemed to her now. But she had the sense to know
that dwelling on what might have been only served to make her morbid,
and did not in the least serve to alter the unalterable. She had chosen
what seemed to her at the time the least of two evils, and she meant to
abide steadfast by her choice.