had not kept boarders for seven years without
getting some useful knowledge of the world, or without imparting useful
knowledge; and there were men who, having paid their bills on demand,
turned from her wiser if not better men. Because they had pursued the
old but inglorious profession of hunting tame things, Mrs. Tyndall Tynan
had exacted compensation in one way or another--by extras, by occasional
and deliberate omission of table luxuries, and by making them pay for
their own mending, which she herself only did when her boarders behaved
themselves well. She scored in any contest--in spite of her rather small
brain, large heart, and ardent appearance. A very clever, shiftless
Irish husband had made her develop shrewdness, and she was so busy
watching and fending her daughter that she did not need to watch and
fend herself to the same extent as she would have done had she been free
and childless and thirty. The widow Tynan was practical, and she saw
none of those things which made her daughter stand for minutes at a time
and look into the distance over the prairie towards the sunset light or
the grey-blue foothills. She never sang--she had never sung a note in
her life; but this girl of hers, with a man's coat in her hand, and eyes
on the joyous scene before her, was for ever humming or singing. She
had even sung in the church choir till she declined to do so any longer,
because strangers stared at her so; which goes to show that she was not
so vain as people of her colouring sometimes are. It was just as bad,
however, when she sat in the congregation; for then, too, if she sang,
people stared at her. So it was that she seldom went to church at all;
but it was not because of this that her ideas of right and wrong were
quite individual and not conventional, as the tale of the matrimonial
deserter will show.

This was not church, however, and briskly applying a light whisk-broom
to the coat, she hummed one of the songs her father taught her when
he was in his buoyant or in his sentimental moods, and that was a fair
proportion of the time. It used to perplex her the thrilling buoyancy
and the creepy melancholy which alternately mastered her father; but as
a child she had become so inured to it that she was not surprised at the
alternate pensive gaiety and the blazing exhilaration of the particular
man whose coat she now dusted long after there remained a speck of dust
upon it. This was the song she sang:

"Whereawa