"But you don't feel it now?"

"One learns to keep such fancies in their place when business demands it," Cliffe answered with a dry smile. "I can remember times when I wanted to go off camping in the Canadian Rockies and join a canoe trip on Labrador rivers. Now and then in the hot weather the traffic in the markets and the dusty offices make me tired. I'll confess that I've felt the snow-peaks and the rapids call."

"We went to Banff once," said Evelyn. "It was very nice."

"But not the real thing! You saw the high peaks from the hotel garden and the passes from an observation car. Then we made one or two excursions with pack-horses, guides, and people like ourselves, where it was quite safe to go. That was as much as your mother could stand for. She'd no sympathy with my hankering after the lone trail."

Evelyn could see his face in the moonlight, and she gave him a quick look. Her father, it seemed, had feelings she had never suspected in him.

"But if you like the mountains, couldn't you enjoy them now?"

[Pg 51]"No," he said, rather grimly. "The grip of my business grows tighter all the time. It costs a good deal to live as we do, and I must keep to the beaten tracks that lead to places where money is made."

[Pg 51]

"I sometimes think we are too extravagant and perhaps more ostentatious than we need be," Evelyn said in a diffident tone.

"We do what our friends expect and your mother has been accustomed to. Then it's my pleasure to give my daughter every advantage I can and, when the time for her to leave us comes, to see she starts fair."

Evelyn was silent for a few moments, feeling touched. She had formed a new conception of her father, who, she had thought, loved the making of money for its own sake. Now it was rather startling to find that in order to give her mother and herself all they could desire, he had held one side of his nature in subjection and cheerfully borne a life of monotonous toil.

"I don't want to leave you," she said in a gentle voice.

He looked at her keenly, and she saw that her mother had been speaking to him about Gore.

"Well," he responded, "I want to keep you as long as possible, but when you want to go I must face 

 Prev. P 36/234 next