ndows were clean and had curtains on, the
stove was polished, and a general air of home comfort was present.

Jim had made an auspicious start.

And every day thereafter showed an added improvement, for it was
little that Langford was able to do out-of-doors in that in-between
season just prior to the freezing up--and all his energies were
evidently being divided between the fixing up of the house and his
usual contributions to Aunt Christina's love column and Captain Mayne
Plunkett's monthly "thriller."

They had hardly been three weeks on the ranch, when the winter set in
for good and shackled the earth in snow and ice.

The morning and evening rides in and out to the smithy were a perfect
delight to Phil and they set his blood effervescing in his veins as it
had never done before.

Many an evening when it was getting late and the great whiteness
around was deathly still, he and Jim would stand on the front veranda
and smoke a pipe together, as they silently drank in the beauty of the
scene about them.

Jim was by nature a dreamer, and it only required an occasion such as
that to set him brooding.

Phil, with the call of the open born in him, preferred the out-of-doors
and nature's silences to all else that the world contained.

They would stand there together, looking over the dark rows of young
trees, erect and soldier-like in the orchard, against the background
of white,--away down to the Kalamalka Lake, smooth and frozen over,
then beyond to the low hills that undulated interminably. Quietly,
they would admire the sky above them as it seemed fairly strung over
with myriads of fairy lamps, twinkling and changing colour in real
fairy delight. They would watch those fairy globes here and there
shatter into fragments--as if with the cold--and trail earthward in a
shimmering streak of silver-dust. They would wait till the moon
sailed up over the hills in all her enchantment, then slowly on the
heels of their boots, they would beat out the dying embers from the
bowls of their pipes, take a glance down the end of the orchard to Ah
Sing's shack--where a dim light, suggestive of nothing else but
Orientalism, seemed ever to be burning--nod to each other and smile,
then turn in without a word and go to bed.

It was in these silences that Phil got to know Jim for the true
gentleman he was. It was away out there in that evening stillness that
Jim, lonely and misunderstood for the most part, grasped for the first
ti