eper experience of their lives, the more material side
of existence had grown less and less to them. Their home was a model
of simple comfort and some luxury, though Jim had insisted that Sally's
income should not be spent, except upon the child, and should be saved
for the child, their home being kept on his pay and on the tiny income
left by his mother. With the help of an Indian girl, and a half-breed
for outdoor work and fires and gardening, Sally had cared for the house
herself. Ingenious and tasteful, with a gift for cooking and an educated
hand, she had made her little home as pretty as their few possessions
would permit. Refinement covered all, and three or four-score books were
like so many friends to comfort her when Jim was away; like kind and
genial neighbours when he was at home. From Browning she had written
down in her long sliding handwriting, and hung up beneath Jim's
looking-glass, the heartening and inspiring words:

"One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake."

They had lived above the sordid, and there was something in the nature
of Jim's life to help them to it. He belonged to a small handful of men
who had control over an empire, with an individual responsibility and
influence not contained in the scope of their commissions. It was a
matter of moral force and character, and of uniform, symbolical only of
the great power behind; of the long arm of the State; of the insistence
of the law, which did not rely upon force alone, but on the certainty of
its administration. In such conditions the smallest brain was bound to
expand, to take on qualities of judgment and temperateness which
would never be developed in ordinary circumstances. In the case of
Jim Templeton, who needed no stimulant to his intellect, but rather a
steadying quality, a sense of proportion, the daily routine, the command
of men, the diverse nature of his duties, half civil, half military,
the personal appeals made on all sides by the people of the country for
advice, for help, for settlement of disputes, for information which
his well-instructed mind could give--all these modified the romantic
brilliance of his intellect, made it and himself more human.

It had not come to him all at once. His intellect at first stood in his