mained
on at Jansen, saying always, however, that she was "going East in the
spring."

Five years had passed, and still she had not gone East, but remained
perched in the rooms she had first taken, over the Imperial Bank, while
the town grew up swiftly round her. And even when the young bank
manager married, and wished to take over the rooms, she sent him to the
right-about from his own premises in her gay, masterful way. The young
manager behaved well in the circumstances, because he had asked her to
marry him, and she had dismissed him with a warning against challenging
his own happiness--that was the way she had put it. Perhaps he was
galled the less because others had striven for the same prize, and had
been thrust back, with an almost tender misgiving as to their sense of
self-preservation and sanity. Some of them were eligible enough, and all
were of some position in the West. Yet she smiled them firmly away, to
the wonder of Jansen, and to its satisfaction, for was it not a tribute
to all that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent
favour? But for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at
times, the self-denial seemed incongruous. She was unconventional enough
to sit on the side-walk with a half-dozen children round her
blowing bubbles, or to romp in any garden, or in the street, playing
Puss-in-the-ring; yet this only made her more popular. Jansen's
admiration was at its highest, however, when she rode in the annual
steeplechase with the best horsemen of the province. She had the gift of
doing as well as of being.

"'Tis the light heart she has, and slippin' in and out of things like a
humming-bird, no easier to ketch, and no longer to stay," said Finden,
the rich Irish landbroker, suggestively to Father Bourassa, the huge
French-Canadian priest who had worked with her through all the dark
weeks of the smallpox epidemic, and who knew what lay beneath the outer
gaiety. She had been buoyant of spirit beside the beds of the sick, and
her words were full of raillery and humour, yet there was ever a gentle
note behind all; and the priest had seen her eyes shining with tears, as
she bent over some stricken sufferer bound upon an interminable journey.

"Bedad! as bright a little spark as ever struck off the steel," added
Finden to the priest, with a sidelong, inquisitive look, "but a heart no
bigger than a marrowfat pea-selfishness, all self. Keepin' herself for
herself when there's manny