ut to her new friend, to
confess all that had happened to her. Why couldn't she? But she was
grateful because Mrs. Maturin betrayed no curiosity. Janet often lay
watching her, puzzled, under the spell of a frankness, an ingenuousness,
a simplicity she had least expected to find in one who belonged to such a
learned place as that of Silliston. But even learning, she was
discovering, could be amazingly simple. Freely and naturally Mrs. Maturin
dwelt on her own past, on the little girl of six taken from her the year
after her husband died, on her husband himself, once a professor here,
and who, just before his last illness, had published a brilliant book on
Russian literature which resulted in his being called to Harvard. They
had gone to Switzerland instead, and Augusta Maturin had come back to
Silliston. She told Janet of the loon-haunted lake, hemmed in by the
Laurentian hills, besieged by forests, where she had spent her girlhood
summers with her father, Professor Wishart, of the University of Toronto.
There, in search of health, Gifford Maturin had come at her father's
suggestion to camp.

Janet, of course, could not know all of that romance, though she tried to
picture it from what her friend told her. Augusta Wishart, at six and
twenty, had been one of those magnificent Canadian women who are most at
home in the open; she could have carried Gifford Maturinout of the
wilderness on her back. She was five feet seven, modelled in proportion,
endowed by some Celtic ancestor with that dark chestnut hair which,
because of its abundance, she wore braided and caught up in a heavy knot
behind her head. Tanned by the northern sun, kneeling upright in a canoe,
she might at a little distance have been mistaken for one of the race to
which the forests and waters had once belonged. The instinct of mothering
was strong in her, and from the beginning she had taken the shy and
delicate student under her wing, recognizing in him one of the physically
helpless dedicated to a supreme function. He was forever catching colds,
his food disagreed with him, and on her own initiative she discharged his
habitant cook and supplied him with one of her own choosing. When
overtaken by one of his indispositions she paddled him about the lake
with lusty strokes, first placing a blanket over his knees, and he
submitted: he had no pride of that sort, he was utterly indifferent to
the figure he cut beside his Amazon. His gentleness of disposition, his