hands in my hair, and ran her fingers slowly, with a strange sort of caressing, up and down and about my head. And then an odd thing happened. She began to sing, in a strange, high, tremulous key, "The Lord is my Shepherd." She did not sing it as you have heard it in church, but with a gentle, rhythmic beat, like a lullaby, just as she had sung it to me many a time when I was a little child. After a while she seemed to fall asleep, and I slipped out again. Father had never moved, but beads of sweat were standing on his forehead.

Marjorie met me, round-eyed and pale, at the door. "Oh, Frank! Is mother going—is mother going—to die?" The last words were breathed rather than spoken.

"I don't know," I said, pushing by her and gulping at something in my throat. . . .

After mother's death Marjorie had to stay at home from school and take charge of the house. Marjorie had a vast native ability behind her deep black eyes, and in a short time matters were running as smoothly as could be hoped. I took a job in the mill—my dream of being a locomotive engineer had vanished almost with my baby teeth—and I was now working from seven in the morning until six at night for a consideration of three dollars a week. My father earned ten dollars a week, so we were in easy circumstances. There were no picture shows to tempt our spare quarters, nor automobiles to make us envious of our more fortunate neighbours.

Jack Lane also took a job in the mill, when I did. We graduated into long trousers together, and made our youthful excursions, arm in arm, into the town on Saturday nights. Jack was a handsome boy, with the fair skin and hair of his sister Jean, and many a coquettish eye was turned on him as we strolled about the little town, or even as he worked at his post in the mill. But while Jack was by no means above a mild flirtation, he used to dismiss such events with the comprehensive remark, "They're not in the class of Marjorie—or Jean."

We were eighteen when the accident happened to Peter Lane. He was working about a shaft, as he had done perhaps a thousand times before, when some loose end of his clothing lapped around it. He clutched the shaft and whirled with it until the strength of his arms gave way; then his body flew out and his head struck a beam. . . . Outside the mill-wheel placidly sprayed its mist of jewels as from the hand of a fairy prince.

I need not follow the events of the next year or so further than to say that my father developed a habit of putting on his good clothes in the evening and brushing his shoes, and walking over to see whether Mrs. Lane might not need some help with the affairs of the farm.

Jack found me one evening in September cutting firewood in the uncleared portion of our farm up by the big pine. The sun was almost setting; it hung like a blood-red globe through an avenue of maple trees, and its slanting light struck the autumn foliage with a wizardry of color and beauty. Jack sat down on a log and when I paused in my work he said, "You're too industrious, Frank; if you are not careful you'll die rich. Come over here; I want to talk to you."

I took a seat at his side, and for a minute or two he punched the earth with a stick, as though uncertain how to open his subject.

"I guess you're as much awake as I am, Frank," he said at length, "so you know what's on the books."

"You mean about my father?" I was going to add, "and your mother," but I stopped; someway it seemed out of place. But Jack filled it in,—"And my mother."

Then we both sat silent for awhile.

"Has he said anything about it to you?" I ventured, "He hasn't mentioned it to me."

"No," said Jack. Then, with one of his unexpected touches of humor,—"I'm not sure that he knows about it yet. But mother does."

"Well, it's all right, isn't it?" I said, after we had had our laugh. "Your mother has been pretty much a mother to Marjorie and me since our own left us. She's O.K. I'm not complaining."

"Neither am I," Jack agreed, "so far as they are concerned. But just how about us? We've got to get out."

"Why?"

Jack turned his full blue eyes on me with a sort of pity. "Do you think Marjorie is going to play second fiddle to a new mother? You don't know your sister, Frank."

In a moment I knew he was right. He had not asked me if I thought that Jack would play second fiddle to a new father, but that, too, may have been in his mind.

"Well, what are we to do about it?"

"Go west!" he said, emphatically. "Go west! I am beginning to think it's the only thing for a young fellow to do, anyway. What is there here for us? Drudge away in the mill, seven to six, seven to six, seven to six, seven to six, week in, month in, year in; then, some day, caught on a shaft, and they stop the mill just long enough to untangle your remains. And that is life! By God, Frank, it's not life—as I see it—as I'm going to see it!"

I turned to him in surprise; it was the first time I had heard him use such an expression. His teeth were set; his thin lips were pressed together; his eyes were big and luminous in the twilight; his pose was a picture of resolution, even of defiance. All unknown to me, Jack Lane had become a man, and his exclamation had had more of prayer than of profanity in it.

Presently he continued: "We can go out to that new country, west of Manitoba, and take up a homestead each. In a few years we will have land enough to make a dozen of these Ontario farms. Others are doing it—so can we. And it won't be so hard for us. The worst thing, usually, is the loneliness; holding it down in a shack, three years or more, all by one's self. But we can get claims beside each other, and, although we'll have to have separate shacks, the girls will keep house for us, so it won't be so bad."

He had touched on something which had already come into my mind. "Will the girls go?" I questioned.

"Frank," he said, and again he seemed to speak from some superior wisdom of his own, "those girls will go with us anywhere we ask them—anywhere!"

CHAPTER III.

When I laid the proposal before Marjorie, she listened with a complacency which suggested that the idea was not entirely new to her.

"I will go and keep house for you," she said, frankly, "if Jack and Jean go too."

It was Sunday afternoon before I had an opportunity to speak to Jean. We were strolling in secluded paths by the river, with bursts of autumn sunshine falling through a gently rustling canopy of gold and bronze and burnished copper and playing the rich hues of the woodland colors across the radiant mass of Jean's fair hair. She was seventeen now, and my wondering eyes had of late beheld her trim girlishness giving way to the first entrancing curves of womanhood. Her light step, her grace of motion, her clear, pink skin, her sensitive lips half parted over rows of well-formed teeth, her eyes large and dreamful, all whispered in some vague way in the ears of my boyhood that Jean was not as other girls; whispered of Jean the artist—Jean the idealist! Jean had not gone into the mill with the other girls of her age; she had continued longer at school, and then had taken up the study of music. Among the limbo of personalities which drifts into the bywaters of little towns, she had found, too, an artist; a man apparently of talent, who had sought the seclusion of our little milling centre in Ontario for reasons which were his own. He had immediately recognized the artistic strain in the girl and had bent his own genius to call it forth with no thought of reward other than the joy of seeing it grow.

"You are wonderful, Miss Lane," he had said, after the first few lessons. "You have perspective and proportion, which are the greatest things in life."

"I think I am a very stupid pupil," Jean had murmured in answer. "You are very patient with me—and all for nothing."

"For nothing! You leave me your debtor! You pay me a thousand times!