She had to go to Fort Garry that day, and started an hour before noon, taking Phil with her as usual, and having her boat piled high with skins taken in barter, bags of feathers, and other marketable products.  There was a short outlet to the bay from the river, a weedy channel leading through flat meadows of vivid green; only, to use an Irishism, they were not meadows at all, but stretches of swamp, in Canadian parlance a muskeg:  and the unwary creature, human or animal, that set foot thereon was speedily engulfed.  Very beautiful these stretches of rich green looked on a bright summer’s day, and Katherine exclaimed in delight as she forced the boat through the weedy channel, which became every week more difficult to pass.

“Oh, Phil, isn’t it lovely!” she cried.

“Can’t say I admire it,” the boy answered grumpily.  “The air down here always seems to choke me, and it is twice as much trouble to drive the boat through this narrow, weedy channel as it is to go the longer way round.”

“I know we shall have to cease coming this way soon, but it is pretty, and I like it,” Katherine answered, and would not admit even to herself that her chief reason in choosing those weedy byways, was the desire to avoid all danger of an encounter with the Selincourts.

The voyage to Fort Garry was without incident, and the interview with the M’Crawneys was of the usual type.  Mrs. M’Crawney was low-spirited and homesick, yearning for Ireland, for the smell of the peat reek and the society of her neighbours.

“I shall die if I stay here much longer.  It is stagnation, not life at all; indeed, I’d sooner be dead,” moaned the poor discontented woman.

“But you have books,” said Katherine, pointing to a well-filled shelf in one corner of the room.  “And if you are so lonely, why not take some girl from an orphanage for a companion?  It would be good for the child and good for you too.”

“Books are not satisfying, and I think it a great waste of time to be always reading,” Mrs. M’Crawney replied with a touch of asperity.  Her husband’s love of books and willingness to spend money upon them was always a sore point with her, only Katherine did not know that, “And I wouldn’t have a strange girl about the house, not whatever.  I never could abide having to do with other people’s children.”

“Then I am afraid you will have to go lonely,” Katherine answered, feeling that it was quite beyond her powers to make any more useful suggestion to the poor unhappy woman, whose ailment consisted more in a discontented mind than a diseased body.

The M’Crawneys were such an ill-matched pair that it always gave her a feeling of irritation to go there, while Peter M’Crawney himself was too much addicted to fulsome compliments to make her willing to face him oftener than need be.  There was a cool. breeze creeping over the water as they turned back towards home, and this tempered the heat, making rowing a pure pleasure.