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 to a log cabin in the wilds of Alberta, he had not only thought, but found the thing for which he desired to exert himself to the point of sacrifice. At the moment when the lure of a new country was driving from his memory the vapid gaieties of West End night clubs, he met a girl who seemed to be the human counterpart of all the mystery and spaciousness in nature which had cast a spell upon him. The acres which his father had acquired many years before for the mere fun of owning something in Canada were a jumble of forest primeval, clear waters, prairies, untamed animals. Louise was a jumble equally enticing. And the passion to reclaim the one became inextricably allied with a passion to reclaim the other. It mattered no more to him that his rivals in the latter case were cowboys than that, in the former, his opponents were inexperience and a sceptical family. In both cases he saw possibilities that others hadn't seen.

His forests and fields, being without a purpose of their own, yielded docilely to his axes and ploughshares and grouped themselves into the picture he had conceived of them. But his wife, after the first months of submission, had begun to sprout and spread with a capricious and bewildering luxuriance.

For some time he felt the change, but not until the arrival of Trenholme Dare did his feeling become statable. Not that there was any technical lack of affection or good will or loyalty; there was simply a great lack of common effort. The original trust and