“Do you suppose,” said Mrs. Trenton, “that that was her own story that she told us?  I think she must have felt it herself to be able to tell it so.”

Just at that moment Bruce Edwards was asking her the same question.

“Oh, no,” she answered, quickly, while an interested group drew near; “people never write their own sorrows—­the broken heart does not sing—­ that’s the sadness of it.  If one can talk of their sorrows they soon cease to be.  It’s because I have not had any sorrows of my own that I have seen and been able to tell of the tragedies of life.”

“Isn’t she the jolly best bluffer you ever heard?” one of the men remarked to another.  “Just think of that beautiful creature, born for admiration, living ten miles from anywhere, on an Albertan ranch of all places, and saying she is happy.  She could be a top-notcher in any society in Canada—­why, great Scott! any of us would have married that girl, and been glad to do it!” And under the glow of this generous declaration Mr. Stanley Carruthers lit his cigarette and watched her with unconcealed admiration.

As the Arts and Crafts had predicted, the newspapers gave considerable space to their open meeting, and the Alberta author came in for a large share of the reporters’ finest spasms.  It was the chance of a lifetime —­here was local color—­human interest—­romance—­thrills!  Good old phrases, clover-scented and rosy-hued, that had lain in cold storage for years, were brought out and used with conscious pride.

There was one paper which boldly hinted at what it called her “mesalliance,” and drew a lurid picture of her domestic unhappiness, “so bravely borne.”  All the gossip of the Convention was in it intensified and exaggerated—­conjectures set down as known truths—­the idle chatter of idle women crystallized in print!

And of this paper a copy was sent by some unknown person to James Dawson, Auburn, Alberta.

* * * * *

The rain was falling at Auburn, Alberta, with the dreary insistence of unwelcome harvest rain.  Just a quiet drizzle—­plenty more where this came from—­no haste, no waste.  It soaked the fields, keeping green the grain which should be ripening in a clear sun.  Kate Dawson had been gone a week, and it would still be a week before she came back.  Just a week—­seven days.  Jim Dawson went over them in his mind as he drove the ten miles over the rain-soaked roads to Auburn to get his daily letter.

Every day she had written to him long letters, full of vital interest to him.  He read them over and over again.

“Nobody really knows how well Kate can write, who has not seen her letters to me,” he thought proudly.  Absence had not made him fonder of his wife, for every day he lived was lived in devotion to her.  The marvel of it all never left him, that such a woman as Kate Marks, who had spent her life in the city, surrounded by cultured friends, should be contented to live the lonely life of a rancher’s wife.