e to haunt her, she yearned to pour it out to her new friend,
to confess all that had happened to her. Why couldn't she? But she was
grateful because Mrs. Maturin betrayed no curiosity. Janet often lay
watching her, puzzled, under the spell of a frankness, an ingenuousness,
a simplicity she had least expected to find in one who belonged to
such a learned place as that of Silliston. But even learning, she
was discovering, could be amazingly simple. Freely and naturally Mrs.
Maturin dwelt on her own past, on the little girl of six taken from
her the year after her husband died, on her husband himself, once a
professor here, and who, just before his last illness, had published a
brilliant book on Russian literature which resulted in his being called
to Harvard. They had gone to Switzerland instead, and Augusta Maturin
had come back to Silliston. She told Janet of the loon-haunted lake,
hemmed in by the Laurentian hills, besieged by forests, where she had
spent her girlhood summers with her father, Professor Wishart, of the
University of Toronto. There, in search of health, Gifford Maturin had
come at her father's suggestion to camp.

Janet, of course, could not know all of that romance, though she tried
to picture it from what her friend told her. Augusta Wishart, at six and
twenty, had been one of those magnificent Canadian women who are most
at home in the open; she could have carried Gifford Maturinout of the
wilderness on her back. She was five feet seven, modelled in proportion,
endowed by some Celtic ancestor with that dark chestnut hair which,
because of its abundance, she wore braided and caught up in a heavy
knot behind her head. Tanned by the northern sun, kneeling upright in a
canoe, she might at a little distance have been mistaken for one of the
race to which the forests and waters had once belonged. The instinct of
mothering was strong in her, and from the beginning she had taken the
shy and delicate student under her wing, recognizing in him one of the
physically helpless dedicated to a supreme function. He was forever
catching colds, his food disagreed with him, and on her own initiative
she discharged his habitant cook and supplied him with one of her own
choosing. When overtaken by one of his indispositions she paddled him
about the lake with lusty strokes, first placing a blanket over his
knees, and he submitted: he had no pride of that sort, he was utterly
indifferent to the figure he cut beside his Amaz