was that his overalls were newer and that his flannel shirt was plainly
a Piccadilly product.

Nora had known gentlemen farmers in England who worked hard, riding
about their estates every day supervising and directing everything, and
who seemed, from their conversation, to take it all seriously enough.
She had made all allowance for the rougher life in a new and unsettled
country. There was something picturesque and romantic about the
frontiersman which had always appealed to her imagination. She had read
a little of him and had seen a play in London the night she recognized
Reggie from afar, where the scene was laid in the Far West. On returning
to the hotel she had looked with new interest at Eddie's photograph and
tried to picture him in the costume worn by the leading man.

But to find that her own brother, a man of education and refinement,
actually worked with his own hands like a common laborer and--what to
Nora's mind was infinitely more incomprehensible--on a footing of
perfect equality with his hired men, calling them familiarly by their
given names and being called "Ed" in turn, was a distinctly disagreeable
revelation. That they should be familiar with Gertie was quite another
matter. Probably they were acquaintances of long standing dating back to
her old hotel days.

Her sister-in-law, too, was absolutely different from the type she had
imagined. Always she had seen her as one of those vapid, pretty little
creatures who had become old long before her time; peevish, spoiled,
inclined to be flirtatious, refusing to give up her youth, still living
in the recollection of her little day of triumph.

Gertie fulfilled only one of these conditions. She was a small woman,