“Let her live as long as she likes,” Reginald declared, “if she’s so jolly keen on it!”

When they decided to trust no more to the deceitfulness of woman they turned to another quarter for help, for they were, at this time, “uncommonly low in funds.”

It was Randolph who got the idea, one day when he was sitting on the plow handle lighting his pipe.

“Wot’s the matter with us gettin’ out Fred for our farm pupil?  He’s got some money—­they say he married a rich man’s daughter—­and we’ve got the experience!”

“He’s only a ’alf-brother!” said Reginald, at last, reflectively.

“That don’t matter one bit to me,” declared Randolph, generously, “I’ll treat him just the same as I would you!”

Reginald shrugged his shoulders eloquently.

“What about his missus?” asked Reginald, after a silence.

“She can come,” Randolph said, magnanimously.  “We’ll build a piece to the house.”

The more they talked about it the more enthusiastic they became.  Under the glow of this new project they felt they could hurl contempt on Aunt Patience and her unnatural hold on life.

“I don’t know but what I would rather take ‘elp from the livin’ than the dead, anyway,” Reginald said, virtuously, that night before they went to bed.

“They’re more h’apt to ask it back, just the same,” objected Randolph.

“I was just goin’ to say,” Reginald began again, “that I’d just as soon take ‘elp from the livin’ as the dead, especially when there ain’t no dead!”

They began at once to write letters to their long-neglected brother Fred, enthusiastically setting forth the charms of this new country.  They dwelt on the freedom of the life, the abundance of game, and the view!  They made a great deal of the view, and certainly there was nothing to obstruct it, for the prairie lay a dead level for ten miles north of them, only dotted here and there with little weather-bleached warts of houses like their own, where other optimists were trying to make a dint in the monotony.

The letters which went east every mail were splendid productions in their way, written with ease and eloquence, and utterly untrammeled by any regard for facts.

Their brother responded just as they hoped he would, and the twins were greatly delighted with the success of their plan.

Events of which the twins knew nothing favored their project and made Fred and his wife glad to leave Toronto.  Evelyn Grant had bitterly estranged her father by marrying against his wishes.  So the proposal from Randolph and Reginald that they come West and take the homestead near them seemed to offer an escape from much that was unpleasant.  Besides, it was just at the time when so many people were hearing the call of the West.