inhabitants exhibit at least a trace of primitive and wholesome
barbarity. One could have fancied him at home among men of leisure and
cultivated tastes, but he seemed out of place in a log-built ranch in
the snow-wrapped wilderness swept by the bitter wind. Perhaps he
realized it, for his voice was querulous as he said, "I wonder if you
have forgotten, Nellie, that we were sitting warm and safe in England
five years ago tonight."

Nellie Townshead looked up quickly over her sewing from the other side
of the stove, and for a moment there was something akin to pain in her
eyes. They were clear brown eyes, and it was characteristic that they
almost immediately brightened into a smile, for while the girl's face
resembled her father's in its refinement, there was courage in it in
place of weariness.

"I am afraid I do, though I try not to, and am generally able," she
said.

Townshead sighed. "The young are fortunate, for they can forget," he
said. "Even that small compensation is, however, denied to me, while
the man I called my friend is living in luxury on what was yours and
mine. Had it been any one but Charters I might have borne it better,
but it was the one man I had faith in who sent us out here to penury."

Townshead was wrong in one respect, for it was the weakness of an
over-sensitive temperament which, while friends were ready to help him,
had driven him to hide himself in Western Canada when, as the result of
unwise speculations, financial disaster overtook him. His daughter,
however, did not remind him of this, as some daughters would have done,
though she understood it well enough, and a memory out of keeping with