e living wild things of the prairies had stolen
into winter quarters. Yet, as Cassy Mavor looked out upon the exquisite
beauty of the scene, upon the splendid outspanning of the sun along the
hills, the deep plangent blue of the sky and the thrilling light, she
saw a world in agony and she heard the moans of the afflicted. The sun
shone bright on the windows of Lumley's house, but she could hear the
crying of Abner's wife, and of old Ezra and Eliza Lumley, when their
children were stricken or shamed; when Abel Baragar drew tighter and
tighter the chains of the mortgage, which at last made them tenants
in the house once their own. Only eight years ago, and all this had
happened. And what had not happened to her, too, in those eight years!

With George--reckless, useless, loving, lying George--she had left
Lumley's with her sickness cured, as it seemed, after a long year in the
West, and had begun life again. What sort of life had it been? "Kicking
up her heels on the stage," as Abel Baragar had said; but, somehow,
not as it was before she went West to give her perforated lung to the
healing air of the plains, and to live outdoors with the men--a man's
life. Then she had never put a curb on her tongue, or greatly on her
actions, except that, though a hundred men quarrelled openly, or in
their own minds, about her, no one had ever had any right to quarrel
about her. With a tongue which made men gasp with laughter, with as
comic a gift as ever woman had, and as equally comic a face, she had
been a good-natured little tyrant in her way. She had given a kiss here
and there, and had taken one, but always there had been before her mind
the picture of a careworn woman who struggled to bring up her three
children honestly, and without the help of charity, and, with a sigh of
content and weariness, had died as Cassy made her first hit on the stage
and her name became a household word. And Cassy, garish, gay, freckled,
witty and whimsical, had never forgotten those days when her mother
prayed and worked her heart out to do her duty by her children. Cassy
Mavor had made her following, had won her place, was the idol of "the
gallery"; and yet she was "of the people," as she had always been, until
her first sickness came, and she had gone out to Lumley's, out along the
foothills of the Rockies.

What had made her fall in love with George Baragar?

She could not have told, if she had been asked. He was wayward, given to
drink at time