clever, she had never cared for
the printed page--was when, by chance, poetry or verses were read or
recited. Then she would listen eagerly, not attracted by the words, but
by the music of the lines, by the rhyme and rhythm, by the underlying
feeling; and she got something out of it which had in one sense nothing
to do with the verses themselves or with the conception of the poet.

Curiously enough, she most liked to hear Jesse Bulrush read. He was
a born sentimentalist, and this became by no means subtly apparent to
Kitty during Crozier's illness. Whenever Nurse Egan was on duty Jesse
contrived to be about, and to make himself useful and ornamental too;
for he was a picturesque figure, with a taste for figured waistcoats and
clean linen--he always washed his own white trousers and waistcoats, and
he had a taste in ties, which he made for himself out of silk bought
by the yard. He was, in fact, a clean, wholesome man, with a flair for
material things, as he had shown in the land proposal on which Shiel
Crozier's fortunes hung, but with no gift for carrying them out, having
neither constructive ability nor continuity of purpose. Yet he was an
agreeable, humorous, sentimental soul, who at fifty years of age found
himself "an old bach," as he called himself, in love at last with a
middle-aged nurse with dark brown hair and set figure, keen, intelligent
eyes, and a most cheerful, orderly, and soothing way with her.

Before Shiel Crozier was taken ill their romance began; but it grew in
volume and intensity after the trial and the shooting, when they met by
the bedside of the wounded man. Jesse had been away so much in different
parts of the country before then that their individual merits never had
had a real chance to make permanent impression. By accident, however,
his business made it necessary for him to be much in Askatoon at
the moment, and it was a propitious time for the growth of the finer
feelings.

It had given Jesse Bulrush real satisfaction that Kitty Tynan listened
to his reading of poetry--Longfellow, Byron, Tennyson, Whyte Melville,
and Adam Lindsay Gordon chiefly--with such absorbed interest. His
content was the greater because his lovely nurse--he did think she was
lovely, as Rubens thought his painted ladies beautiful, though their
cordial, ostentatious proportions are not what Raphael regarded as the
divine lines--because his lovely nurse listened to his fat, happy voice
rising and falling, swelling a