warning against challenging
his own happiness--that was the way she had put it. Perhaps he was galled
the less because others had striven for the same prize, and had been
thrust back, with an almost tender misgiving as to their sense of
self-preservation and sanity. Some of them were eligible enough, and all
were of some position in the West. Yet she smiled them firmly away, to the
wonder of Jansen, and to its satisfaction, for was it not a tribute to all
that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent favor? But
for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at times, the
self-denial seemed incongruous. She was unconventional enough to sit on
the sidewalk with a half-dozen children round her blowing bubbles, or to
romp in any garden, or in the street, playing Puss-in-the-ring; yet this
only made her more popular. Jansen's admiration was at its highest,
however, when she rode in the annual steeplechase with the best horsemen
of the province. She had the gift of doing as well as of being.

"'Tis the light heart she has, and slippin' in and out of things like a
hummin'-bird, no easier to ketch and no longer to stay," said Finden, the
rich Irish landbroker, suggestively to Father Bourassa, the huge
French-Canadian priest who had worked with her through all the dark weeks
of the smallpox epidemic, and who knew what lay beneath the outer gayety.
She had been buoyant of spirit beside the beds of the sick, and her words
were full of raillery and humor, yet there was ever a gentle note behind
all; and the priest had seen her eyes shining with tears as she bent over
some stricken sufferer bound upon an interminable journey.

"Bedad! as bright a little spark as ever struck off the steel," added
Finden to the priest, with a sidelong, inquisitive look, "but a heart no
bigger than a marrowfat pea--selfishness, all self. Keepin' herself for
herself when there's many a good man needin' her. Mother o' Moses, how
many! From Terry O'Ryan, brother of a peer, at Latouche, to Bernard Bapty,
son of a millionaire, at Vancouver, there's a string o' them. All pride
and self; and as fair a lot they've been as ever entered for the Marriage
Cup. Now isn't that so, father?"

Finden's brogue did not come from a plebeian origin. It was part of his
commercial equipment, an asset of his boyhood spent among the peasants on
the family estate in Galway.

Father Bourassa fanned himself with the black broadbrim hat he wore, and
looke