y were never seen by others. They were sacred to her own
solitude. While in Montreal she had tasted for the first time the joys
of the theatre, and had then secretly read numbers of plays, which she
bought from an old bookseller, who was wise enough to choose them for
her. She became possessed of a love for the stage even before Gerard
Fynes came upon the scene. The beginning of it all was the rumour that
her mother was now an actress; yet the root-cause was far down in a
temperament responsive to all artistic things.

The coming of the Man from Outside acted on the confined elements of
her nature like the shutter of a camera. It let in a world of light upon
unexplored places, it set free elements of being which had not before
been active. She had been instantly drawn to Gerard Fynes. He had the
distance from her own life which provoked interest, and in that distance
was the mother whom perhaps it was her duty to forget, yet for whom she
had a longing which grew greater as the years went on.

Gerard Fynes could talk well, and his vivid pictures of his short
play-acting career absorbed her; and all the time she was vigilant for
some name, for the description of some actress which would seem to be
a clue to the lost spirit of her life. This clue never came, but before
she gave up hope of it, the man had got nearer to her than any man had
ever done.

After meeting him she awoke to the fact that there was a difference
between men, that it was not the same thing to be young as to be old;
that the reason why she could kiss the old Judge and the little Clerk of
the Court, and not kiss, say, the young manager of the great lumber firm
who came every year for a fortnight's fishing at St. Saviour's, was
one which had an understandable cause and was not a mere matter of
individual taste. She had been good friends with this young manager, who
was only thirty years of age, and was married, but when he had wanted
to kiss her on saying good-bye one recent summer, she had said, "Oh,
no, oh, no, that would spoil it all!" Yet when he had asked her why, and
what she meant, she could not tell him. She did not know; but by the
end of the first week after Gerard Fynes had been brought to the Manor
Cartier by Louis Charron, she knew.

She had then been suddenly awakened from mere girlhood. Judge Carcasson
saw the difference in her on a half-hour's visit as he passed westward,
and he had said to M. Fille, "Who is the man, my keeper of the
t