life in paying for her own rash act. The thought that she was paying with interest, being overcharged as it were, was but faint consolation: it only meant that she had been a fool. That conviction is rarely soothing.
Then, too, she gradually began to look at the situation from Frank's point of view. He had certainly acted within his rights, if with little generosity. But she had to acknowledge to herself that the obligation to be generous on his part was small. She could hardly be said to have treated him with much liberality in the past.
She had used him without scruple as a means to an end. She had made him the instrument for escaping from a predicament which she found unbearably irksome. That she had done so in the heat of passion was small palliation. For the present, at least, she wisely resolved to make the best of things. It could not last forever. The day must come when she could free herself from the bonds that now held her.
It was characteristic of her unyielding pride, of her reluctance to confess to defeat, that the thought of appealing to her brother never once entered her head.
For this reason, it was long before she could bring herself to write the promised letter to Eddie. What was there to say? The things that would have relieved her, in a sense, to tell, must remain forever locked in her own heart. In the end, she compromised by sending a letter confined entirely to describing her new home. As she read it over, she thanked the Fates that Eddie's was not a subtile or analytical mind. He would read nothing between the lines. But Gertie? Well, it couldn't be helped!
It was some two months after her marriage that she received a letter from Miss Pringle in answer to the one she had written while she was still an inmate of her brother's house.
Miss Pringle confined herself largely to an account of her Continental wanderings and her bloodless encounters with various foreigners and their ridiculous un-English customs from which she had emerged triumphant and victorious. Mrs. Hubbard's precarious state of health had led her into being unusually captious, it seemed. Miss Pringle was more than ever content to be back in Tunbridge Wells, where all the world was, by comparison, sane and reasonable in behavior.
When it came to touching upon her friend's amazing environment and unconventional experiences, Miss Pringle was discretion itself. But if her paragraphs had bristled with exclamation points, they could not, to one who understood her mental processes, have more clearly betrayed her utter disapproval and amazement that English people, and descendants of English people, could so far forget themselves as to live in any such manner.
Replying to this letter was only a degree less hard than writing to Eddie. Nora's ready pen faltered more than once, and many pages were destroyed before an answer was sent. She confined herself entirely to describing the new experience of a Canadian winter. Of her departure from her brother's roof and of her marriage, she said nothing whatever.
In accordance with her resolution to make the best of things, she set about making the shack more comfortable and homelike. There were many of those things which, small in themselves, count for much, that her busy brain planned to do during the time taken up in the necessary overhauling. This cleaning-up process had taken several days, interrupted as it was by the ordinary daily routine.
To her unaccustomed hand, the task of preparing three hearty meals a day was a matter that consumed a large amount of time, but gradually, day by day, she found herself systematizing her task and becoming less inexpert. To be sure she made many mistakes; once, indeed, in a fit of preoccupation, while occupied in rearranging the bedroom, burning up the entire dinner.
Upon his return, her husband had found her red-eyed and apologetic.
'Oh, well!' he said. 'It ain't worth crying over. What is the saying? 'Hell wasn't built in a day'?'
Nora screamed with laughter. 'I think you're mixing two old saws. Rome wasn't built in a day and Hell is paved with good intentions.'
'Well,' he laughed good-naturedly, 'they both seem to hit the case.'
He certainly was unfailingly good-tempered. Not that there were not times when Nora did not have to remind herself of her new resolution and he, for his part, exercise all his forbearance. But in the main, things went more smoothly than either had dared to hope from their inauspicious beginning.
The thing that Nora found hardest to bear was that he never lost a certain masterful manner. It was a continual reminder that she
