try to cook. I know I shall. I feel it beginning on me, and I
shall have rough hands, and my skin will get red and blotchy, just
like a cook's, and there will always be a greasy smell on my clothes.
I am going to cry, Arthur, I am, now, really, and nobody can stop me,
and I do cry dreadfully when I start."

"Oh, don't cry, Thursa!" Arthur pleaded, with all the helplessness of
a man in the presence of tears. "Don't cry, dearest. You'll break my
heart if you cry the first day you come into your new home. I don't
want you to cook or work or do anything, only just stay with me and
love me and let me look at you--you are too beautiful to ever have to
work, darling."

Contrary to her expectations, Thursa did not cry, but looked at
Arthur with a very shrewd expression on her pretty face.

"I'd rather stay here and take a chance on it--that's a Canadian
word, too--than go back to the aunts and have to work antimacassars
and put up with them trailing around after me always--that was
perfectly maddening--but it seems to me--" she went over to Arthur's
new sideboard and looked critically into the glass--"it seems to me a
girl like me--you see I am not what you might call a fright, am I,
Arthur?--and here in Canada there are abundant opportunities for good
marriages--I think I really should do pretty well."

Arthur stood beside her looking at her image in the glass. When her
meaning became clear he turned away hastily to hide the hurt her
words had given him.

"You mean I am not good enough for you. You are quite right, I am
not. You are a queen among women, Thursa."

"Queen nothing!" Thursa cried impatiently. "You make love like they
do it in Scott's novels. The aunts made me read it, and now I simply
loathe anything that sounds like it. Now, Mr. Smeaton said I was a
peach."

Arthur consigned Mr. Smeaton and all such cads to a hotter climate.

"Good for you, Arthur!" she said, laughing, "you can ride the high
horse, too. I like you like that. Now, Mr. Smeaton said----"

"See here, Thursa," Arthur broke in, "did that cur make love to you?"

"Madly," she said.

"And you let him--and listened?"

She clapped her hands and laughed merrily.

"Listened? I didn't have to listen hard. He was near me, you know,
and he did make love so beautifully. I wish you could have heard
him."

"I'd have bashed his head for him," Arthur said hotly. "Who is he,
anyway?"

"He has a dry-goods store in Brandon. He's a linen-draper reall