the headlong urge of youth is spent and his race
near run.

On the river side of the first coach behind the diner, Estella Benton
nursed her round chin in the palm of one hand, leaning her elbow on the
window sill. It was a relief to look over a widening valley instead of a
bare-walled gorge all scarred with slides, to see wooded heights lift
green in place of barren cliffs, to watch banks of fern massed against
the right of way where for a day and a night parched sagebrush, brown
tumble-weed, and such scant growth as flourished in the arid uplands of
interior British Columbia had streamed in barren monotony, hot and dry
and still.

She was near the finish of her journey. Pensively she considered the end
of the road. How would it be there? What manner of folk and country?
Between her past mode of life and the new that she was hurrying toward
lay the vast gulf of distance, of custom, of class even. It was bound to
be crude, to be full of inconveniences and uncouthness. Her brother's
letters had partly prepared her for that. Involuntarily she shrank from
it, had been shrinking from it by fits and starts all the way, as
flowers that thrive best in shady nooks shrink from hot sun and rude
winds. Not that Estella Benton was particularly flower-like. On the
contrary she was a healthy, vigorous-bodied young woman, scarcely to be
described as beautiful, yet undeniably attractive. Obviously a daughter
of the well-to-do, one of that American type which flourishes in
families to which American politicians unctuously refer as the backbone
of the nation. Outwardly, gazing riverward through the dusty pane, she
bore herself with utmost serenity. Inwardly she was full of misgivings.

Four days of lonely travel across a continent, hearing the drumming
clack of car wheels and rail joint ninety-six hours on end, acutely
conscious that every hour of the ninety-six put its due quota of miles
between the known and the unknown, may be either an adventure, a bore,
or a calamity, depending altogether upon the individual point of view,
upon conditioning circumstances and previous experience.

Estella Benton's experience along such lines was chiefly a blank and the
conditioning circumstances of her present journey were somber enough to
breed thought that verged upon the melancholy. Save for a natural
buoyancy of spirit she might have wept her way across North America. She
had no tried standard by which to measure life's values for she had
liv