asurable excitement, innumerable
anticipations. Now it stirred her less than the three hundred dollars
she had just received from the Granada Concert committee. She had earned
that, had given for it due measure of herself. This other had come
without effort, without expectation. And less than she had ever needed
money before did she now require such a sum.

Yet she was sensibly aware that this windfall meant a short cut to
things which she had only looked to attain by plodding over economic
hills. She could say good-by to singing in photoplay houses, to
vaudeville engagements, to concert work in provincial towns. She could
hitch her wagon to a star and go straight up the avenue that led to a
career, if it were in her to achieve greatness. Pleasant dreams in which
the buoyant ego soared, until the logical interpretation of her
ambitions brought her to a more practical consideration of ways and
means, and that in turn confronted her with the fact that she could
leave the Pacific coast to-morrow morning if she so chose.

Why should she not so choose?

She was her own mistress, free as the wind. Fyfe had said that. She
looked out into the smoky veil that shrouded the water front and the
hills across the Inlet, that swirled and eddied above the giant fir in
Stanley Park, and her mind flicked back to Roaring Lake where the Red
Flower of Kipling's _Jungle Book_ bloomed to her husband's ruin. Did it?
She wondered. She could not think of him as beaten, bested in any
undertaking. She had never been able to think of him in those terms.
Always to her he had conveyed the impression of a superman. Always she
had been a little in awe of him, of his strength, his patient,
inflexible determination, glimpsing under his habitual repression
certain tremendous forces. She could not conceive him as a broken man.

Staring out into the smoky air, she wondered if the fires at Roaring
Lake still ravaged that noble forest; if Fyfe's resources, like her
brother's, were wholly involved in standing timber, and if that timber
were doomed? She craved to know. Secured herself by that green slip in
her hand against every possible need, she wondered if it were ordained
that the two men whose possession of material resources had molded her
into what she was to-day should lose all, be reduced to the same stress
that had made her an unwilling drudge in her brother's kitchen. Then she
recalled that for Charlie there was an equivalent sum due,--a share lik