“Burlingame—but Burlingame’s
beneath notice,” rejoined Kitty. “Isn’t
he, mother?”
Mrs. Tynan nodded. Then, as though with sudden
impulse, Kitty came forward to Crozier and leaned
over him. The look of a mother was in her eyes.
Somehow she seemed to herself twenty years older than
this man with the heart of a boy, who was afraid of
his own wife.
“It’s time for your beef-tea, and when
you’ve had it you must get your sleep,”
she said, with a hovering solicitude.
“I’d like to give him a threshing first,
if you don’t mind,” said the Young Doctor
to her.
“Please let a little good advice satisfy you,”
Crozier remarked ruefully. “It will seem
like old times,” he added rather bitterly.
“You are too young to have had ‘old times,’”
said Kitty with gentle scorn. “I’ll
like you better when you are older,” she added.
“Naughty jade,” exclaimed the Young Doctor,
“you ought to be more respectful to those older
than yourself.”
“Oh, grandpapa!” she retorted.
A WOMAN’S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
The harvest was over. The grain was cut, the
prairie no longer waved like a golden sea, but the
smoke of the incense of sacrifice still rose in innumerable
spirals in the circle of the eye. The ground
appeared bare and ill-treated, like a sheep first
shorn; but yet nothing could take away from it the
look of plenty, even as the fat sides of the shorn
sheep invite the satisfied eye of the expert.
The land now, all stubble, still looked good for
anything. If bare, it did not seem starved.
It was naked and unshaven; it was stripped like a
boxer for the rubbing-down after the fight.
Not so refined and suggestive and luxurious as when
it was clothed with the coat of ripe corn in the ear,
it still showed the fibre of its being to no disadvantage.
And overhead the joy of the prairie grew apace.
September saw the vast prairie spaces around Askatoon
shorn and shrivelled of its glory of ripened grain,
but with a new life come into the air-sweet, stinging,
vibrant life, which had the suggestion of nature recreating
her vitality, inflaming herself with Edenic strength,
a battery charging itself, to charge the world in
turn with force and energy. Morning gave pure
elation, as though all created being must strive;
noon was the pulse of existence at the top of its activity;
evening was glamorous; and all the lower sky was spread
with those colours which Titian stole from the joyous
horizon that filled his eyes. There was in that
evening light, somehow, just a touch of pensiveness—
the triste delicacy of heliotrope, harbinger of the
Indian summer soon to come, when the air would make
all sensitive souls turn to the past and forget that
to-morrow was all in all.
