t, and with
that bus-driver of Stevenson's who drove to the station and then drove
back, cry 'My God is this life!' There was nothing real anywhere.
Nobody ever expected a woman in our set to do anything worth doing."
She broke off, and gave a little laugh, then continued: "Now I have my
chance to prove I'm something better than a doll, and I'm not going to
be robbed of it by Gerald Ainley, my uncle, or any one else! This camp
depends on me for a time at least, and I'm going to make good; and
prove myself for my own satisfaction. Do you understand?"

"Yes," answered Stane, his eyes shining with admiration.

"That is what I meant when I said that if you only knew it, I was
thinking of myself. It would strike some people as a little mad. I know
some women who in a situation like this would have sat down and just
cried themselves to death."

"So do I. Lots of them."

"I don't feel that way. I feel rather like a man I know at home who was
brought up on the sheltered life system, nursery governess, private
tutor, etc., who when he came of age just ran amok, drank, fought with
the colliers on his own estate, and then enlisted in an irregular corps
and went to fight the Spaniards in Cuba, just to prove to himself that
he wasn't the ninny his father had tried to make him. He shocked his
neighbours thoroughly, but he's a man today, listened to when he speaks
and just adored by the miners on his estate.... I want to make good,
and though Mrs. Grundy would chatter if she knew that I had
deliberately chosen to remain and nurse a sick man in such conditions,
I don't care a jot."

"You needn't worry about Mrs. Grundy," he laughed. "She died up here
about 1898, and was buried on the road to the Klondyke."

Helen Yardely joined in his laughter. "May she never be
resurrected--though I am afraid she will be. Where there are
half-a-dozen conventional women Mrs. Grundy is always in the midst. But
I'm free of her for the time, and I'm just going to live the primitive
life whilst I'm here. I feel that I have got it in me to enjoy the life
of the woods, and to endure hardships like any daughter of the land,
and I'm going to do it. Not that there is much hardship about it now!
It is just an extended pic-nic, and I wouldn't have missed it for
anything."

Stane smiled. "I am very glad you feel like that," he said. "I myself
shall be much happier in mind and I count myself lucky to have fallen
in such capable hands!"

"Capable!" she lo