te. On his
way to his office, he turned and looked after her with a frown as she
rattled her team along the uneven road. She was a vain and covetous
woman with a bias towards intrigue, but there had been times since her
marriage when she despised herself, and as a natural consequence blamed
her husband. Sometimes she hated Thurston, also, though more often she
was sensible of vague regrets, and grew morbid thinking of what might
have been. Now she flushed a little as she glanced at the ponies and
remembered that they were the price of treachery. The animals were
innocent, but she found satisfaction in making them feel the sting of
the whip.

She looked back at the city.

It rose in terraces above the broad inlet--a maze of wooden buildings,
giving place to stone. Over its streets hung a wire network, raised
high on lofty poles, which would have destroyed the beauty of a much
fairer city. Back of the city rose the somber forest over which at
intervals towered the blasted skeleton of some gigantic pine.

Millicent felt that she detested both the city, with its crude mingling
of primitive simplicity and Western luxury, and the life she lived in
it. It was a life of pretense and struggle, in which she suffered
bitter mortifications daily. Presently she reined the team in to a
walk as she drove under the cool shade of the primeval forest which,
with a wisdom not common in the West, the inhabitants of Vancouver have
left unspoiled as Nature. A few drives have been cut through the trees
and between the long rows of giant trunks she could catch at intervals
the silver shimmer of the Straits. In this park there was only restful
shadow. Its silence was intensified by the soft thud of hoofs. A dim
perspective of tremendous trees whose great branches interlocked,
forming arches for the roof of somber green very far above, lured her
on.

Millicent felt the spell of the silence and sighed remembering how the
lover whom she had discarded once pleaded that she would help him in a
life of healthful labor. She regretted that she had not consented to
flee with him to the new country. Now she was tied to a man she
despised, and who had put her, so she considered, to open shame. She
could not help comparing his weak, greedy, yet venomous nature, with
the other's courage, clean purpose and transparent honesty.

"I was a fool, ten times a fool; but it is too late," she told herself,
and then tightening her grip on the re