neither constructive ability nor continuity of purpose. Yet he was an
agreeable, humorous, sentimental soul, who at fifty years of age found
himself "an old bach," as he called himself, in love at last with a
middle-aged nurse with dark brown hair and set figure, keen, intelligent
eyes, and a most cheerful, orderly, and soothing way with her.

Before Shiel Crozier was taken ill their romance began; but it grew in
volume and intensity after the trial and the shooting, when they met by
the bedside of the wounded man. Jesse had been away so much in different
parts of the country before then that their individual merits never had
had a real chance to make permanent impression. By accident, however,
his business made it necessary for him to be much in Askatoon at the
moment, and it was a propitious time for the growth of the finer
feelings.

It had given Jesse Bulrush real satisfaction that Kitty Tynan listened to
his reading of poetry--Longfellow, Byron, Tennyson, Whyte Melville, and
Adam Lindsay Gordon chiefly--with such absorbed interest. His content
was the greater because his lovely nurse--he did think she was lovely,
as Rubens thought his painted ladies beautiful, though their cordial,
ostentatious proportions are not what Raphael regarded as the divine
lines--because his lovely nurse listened to his fat, happy voice rising
and falling, swelling and receding on the waves of verse; though it meant
nothing to her that one who had the gift of pleasant sound was using it
on her behalf.

This was not apparent to her Bulrush, though Crozier and Kitty
understood. Jesse only saw in the blue-garbed, clear-visaged woman a
mistress of his heart, who had all the virtues and graces and who did not
talk. That, to him, was the best thing of all. She was a superb