get?"

She looked up, with some color in her face. "Not in a way, Jim, but we
took the proper line. We felt you ought to have a chance to let us go."

"And now I hope you're satisfied, since you have found out I'm not as
shabby as you thought."

"Oh, well," said Carrie, smiling, "I suppose we do feel some
satisfaction."

Then Jake and Mrs. Winter returned and they went to the Canadian
Pacific station, where Jim asked about the steamship sailings.

PART II--THE LANDOWNER

CHAPTER I

JIM COMES HOME

The car ran out from the tall hedgerows that bordered the narrow road
and at length Jim could look about. He had not been able to see much
on his way from the station where Mordaunt had met him, and now he had
an unbroken view he studied the English landscape with keen curiosity.
On one side, rugged mountains rose against the lowering sky, but a
moving ray of sunshine touched the plain below. In front, the road ran
across a marsh, between deep ditches where tall sedges grew. Beyond
the marsh, wet sands stretched back to the blurred woods across a bay,
and farther off, low hills loomed indistinctly in the mist.

Jim noted that the landscape had not the monotony he had sometimes felt
in Canada. The fields behind the marsh looked ridiculously small, but
some were smooth and green and some dotted by yellow stocks of corn.
Then there was a play of color that changed from cold blues and grays
to silver and ochre as the light came and went. White farmsteads,
standing among dark trees, were scattered about, but the country was
not tame. The hills and wide belt of sands gave it a rugged touch.
There had been some rain and the wind was cold.

As the car jolted along the straight road between the ditches, Jim
began to muse. He had felt a stranger in London, where he had stopped
a week. He knew the Canadian cities, but London was different. Yet
since he left the station the feeling of strangeness had gone; it was
as if he had reached a country that he knew. He wondered whether he
unconsciously remembered his father's talk, or if the curious sense of
familiarity was, so to speak, atavistic. This, however, was not
important, and he glanced at Carrie, who sat behind with Mrs. Winter
and Jake.

Carrie had frankly enjoyed her holiday; indeed, Jim thought she had
felt more at home than he when they were in town. Somehow she did not
look exotic among the Englishwomen at the hotel, and when Mordaunt met
them