elation as candidly as they sustained it
was perhaps a little peculiar to them, so I have laid stress on it; but
it was not by any means their sole preoccupation. They talked like
tried friends of their every-day affairs. Indeed, after the trouble and
intoxication of their great understanding had spent itself, it was the
small practical interests of life that seemed to hold them most. One
might think that Nature, having made them her invitation upon the higher
plane, abandoned them in the very scorn of her success to the warm human
commonplaces that do her work well enough with the common type. Mrs
Murchison would have thought better of them if she had chanced again to
overhear.

"I wouldn't advise you to have it lined with fur," Advena was saying.
The winter had sharply announced itself, and Finlay, to her reproach
about his light overcoat, had declared his intention of ordering a
buffalo-skin the following day. "And the buffaloes are all gone, you
know--thirty years ago," she laughed. "You really are not modern in
practical matters. Does it ever surprise you that you get no pemmican
for dinner, and hardly ever meet an Indian in his feathers?"

He looked at her with delight in his sombre eyes. It was a new
discovery, her capacity for happily chaffing him, only revealed since
she had come out of her bonds to love; it was hard to say which of them
took the greater pleasure in it.

"What is the use of living in Canada if you can't have fur on your
clothes?" he demanded.

"You may have a little--astrakhan, I would--on the collar and cuffs,"
she said. "A fur lining is too hot if there happens to be a thaw, and
then you would leave it off and take cold. You have all the look," she
added, with a gravely considering glance at him, "of a person who ought
to take care of his chest."

He withdrew his eyes hurriedly, and fixed them instead on his pipe. He
always brought it with him, by her order, and Advena usually sewed. He
thought as he watched her that it made the silences enjoyable.

"And expensive, I dare say, too," he said.

"Yes, more or less. Alec paid fifty dollars for his, and never liked
it."

"Fifty dollars--ten pounds! No vair for me!" he declared. "By the way,
Mrs Firmin is threatening to turn me out of house and home. A married
daughter is coming to live with her, and she wants my rooms."

"When does she come--the married daughter?"

"Oh, not till the early spring! There's no immediate despair," said
Fi