choice of posts. I went. By this time I had again vague ideas that
sometime I should come here, but how or why I couldn't tell; I was
drifting, and for her sake willing to drift. I was glad to take her to
Quebec, for I guessed she would get ideas, and it didn't strike me that
she would be out of place. So we went. But she was out of place in
many ways. It did not suit at all. We were asked to good houses, for I
believe I have always had enough of the Belward in me to keep my end up
anywhere. The thing went on pretty well, but at last she used to beg me
to go without her to excursions and parties. There were always one or
two quiet women whom she liked to sit with, and because she seemed
happier for me to go, I did. I was popular, and got along with women
well; but I tell you honestly I loved my wife all the time; so that when
a Christian busy-body poured into her ears some self-made scandal, it was
a brutal, awful lie--brutal and awful, for she had never known jealousy;
it did not belong to her old social creed. But it was in the core of her
somewhere, and an aboriginal passion at work naked is a thing to be
remembered. I had to face it one night. . . .

"I was quiet, and did what I could. After that I insisted on her going
with me wherever I went, but she had changed, and I saw that, in spite of
herself, the thing grew. One day we went on an excursion down the St.
Lawrence. We were merry, and I was telling yarns. We were just nearing
a landing-stage, when a pretty girl, with more gush than sense, caught me
by the arm and begged some ridiculous thing of me--an autograph, or what
not. A minute afterwards I saw my wife spring from the bulwarks down on
the landing-stage, and rush up the shore into the woods. . . . We
were two days finding her. That settled it. I was sick enough at heart,
and I determined to go back to Labrador. We did so. Every thing had
gone on the rocks. My wife was not, never would be, the same again. She
taunted me and worried me, and because I would not quarrel, seemed to