f
the gulf, but gloating on this touch between the old luxurious, indulgent
life, with its refined vices, and this present coarse, hard life, where
pleasures were few and gross. The free Northern life of toil and hardship
had not refined him. He greedily hung over this treasure, which was not
for his spending, yet was his own--as though in a bank he had hoards of
money which he might not withdraw.

So the years had gone on, with their recurrent dreaded anniversaries,
carrying misery almost too great to be borne by this woman mated to the
loathed phantom of a sad, dead life; and when this black day of each year
was over, for a few days afterwards she went nowhere, was seen by none.
Yet, when she did appear again, it was with her old laughing manner, her
cheerful and teasing words, her quick response to the emotions of others.

So it had gone till Varley had come to follow the open-air life for four
months, after a heavy illness due to blood-poisoning got in his surgical
work in London. She had been able to live her life without too great a
struggle till he came. Other men had flattered her vanity, had given her a
sense of power, had made her understand her possibilities, but nothing
more--nothing of what Varley brought with him. And before three months had
gone, she knew that no man had ever interested her as Varley had done. Ten
years before, she would not have appreciated or understood him, this
intellectual, clean-shaven, rigidly abstemious man, whose pleasures
belonged to the fishing-rod and the gun and the horse, and who had come to
be so great a friend of him who had been her best friend--Father Bourassa.
Father Bourassa had come to know the truth--not from her, for she had ever
been a Protestant, but from her husband, who, Catholic by birth and a
renegade from all religion, had had a moment of spurious emotion, when he
went and confessed to Father Bourassa and got absolution, pleading for the
priest's care of his wife. Afterward Father Bourassa made up his mind that
the confession had a purpose behind it other than repentance, and he
deeply resented the use to which he thought he was being put--a kind of
spy upon the beautiful woman whom Jansen loved, and who, in spite of any
outward flippancy, was above reproach.

In vital things the instinct becomes abnormally acute, and, one day, when
the priest looked at her commiseratingly, she had divined what moved him.
However it was, she drove him into a corner with a qu