omniscience, the elaborate and cultivated simplicity of their dress,
their sureness and sufficiency in all that they thought and said and
did. He was homesick again for the life he had glimpsed. The West was
rude, desolate, and depressing. Even Uncle Peter, whom he had come
warmly to admire, jarred upon him with his crudity and his Western
assertiveness.

And there was the woman of the East, whose presence had made the day to
seem dream-like; and she was kind, which was more than he would have
dared to hope, and her people, after their first curious chill of
indifference, seemed actually to be courting him. She, the fleeting and
impalpable dream-love, whom the thought of seeing ever again had been
wildly absurd, was now a human creature with a local habitation, the
most beautiful name in the world, and two parents whose complaisance
was obvious even through the lover's timidity.




CHAPTER VIII.

Up Skiplap Canon


The meal was ending in smoke, the women, excepting Miss Milbrey, having
lighted cigarettes with the men. The talk had grown less truculently
sectional. The Angstead twins told of their late fishing trip to Lake
St. John for salmon, of projected tours to British Columbia for
mountain sheep, and to Manitoba for elk and moose.