happened to her, too, in those eight years!

With George--reckless, useless, loving, lying George--she had left
Lumley's with her sickness cured, as it seemed, after a long year in the
West, and had begun life again. What sort of life had it been? "Kicking
up her heels on the stage," as Abel Baragar had said; but, somehow, not
as it was before she went West to give her perforated lung to the healing
air of the plains, and to live outdoors with the men--a man's life. Then
she had never put a curb on her tongue, or greatly on her actions, except
that, though a hundred men quarrelled openly, or in their own minds,
about her, no one had ever had any right to quarrel about her. With a
tongue which made men gasp with laughter, with as comic a gift as ever
woman had, and as equally comic a face, she had been a good-natured
little tyrant in her way. She had given a kiss here and there, and had
taken one, but always there had been before her mind the picture of a
careworn woman who struggled to bring up her three children honestly, and
without the help of charity, and, with a sigh of content and weariness,
had died as Cassy made her first hit on the stage and her name became a
household word. And Cassy, garish, gay, freckled, witty and whimsical,
had never forgotten those days when her mother prayed and worked her
heart out to do her duty by her children. Cassy Mavor had made her
following, had won her place, was the idol of "the gallery"; and yet she
was "of the people," as she had always been, until her first sickness
came, and she had gone out to Lumley's, out along the foothills of the
Rockies.

What had made her fall in love with George Baragar?

She could not have told, if she had been asked. He was wayward, given to
drink at times, given also to card-playing and racing; but he had a way