going round and round and round in a circle, not forlorn enough to rebel
or break away, but dazed and wondering and shrinking. She was like one
robbed of will, made mechanical by a stern conformity to imposed rules of
life and conduct. There were women in Askatoon who were sorry for her
and made efforts to get near her; but whether it was the Methodist
Minister or his wife, or the most voluble sister of the prayer-meeting,
none got beyond the threshold of Tralee, as it were.

The girl-wife abashed them. She was as one who automatically spoke as
she was told to speak, did what she was told to do. Yet she always
smiled at the visitors when they came, or when she saw them and others at
the Meeting House. It was, however, not a smile for an individual,
whoever that individual might chance to be. It was only the kindness of
her nature expressing itself. Talking seemed like the exercise of a
foreign language to her, but her smiling was free and unconstrained, and
it belonged to all, without selection.

The Young Doctor, looking at her one day as she sat in a buggy while her
monster-man was inside the chemist's shop, said to himself:

"Sterilized! Absolutely, shamefully sterilized! But suppose she wakes
up suddenly out of that dream between life and death--what will happen?"

He remembered that curious, sudden, delicate catch of his palm on the day
when they first shook hands at the railway-station, and to him it was
like the flutter of life in a thing which seemed dead. How often he had
noticed it in man and animal on the verge of extinction! He had not
mistaken that fluttering appeal of her fingers. He was young enough
to translate it into flattering terms of emotion, but he did not do so.
He was fancy-free himself, and the time would come when he would do a