On the drive over from the station, Eddie had vaguely remarked that he had a great surprise for her when she reached the house.  Nora had paid but little attention at the moment, thinking that he probably meant the house itself.  What had been her astonishment—­when once her rage at being lifted bodily from the sled by the man called Frank had permitted of her feeling any other emotion—­to find Reginald Hornby himself an inmate of her brother’s household.  There was but little trace of the ultra smart young Londoner, beyond his still carefully kept hair and mustache.  The only difference between his costume and that of the others was that his overalls were newer and that his flannel shirt was plainly a Piccadilly product.

Nora had known gentlemen farmers in England who worked hard, riding about their estates every day supervising and directing everything, and who seemed, from their conversation, to take it all seriously enough.  She had made all allowance for the rougher life in a new and unsettled country.  There was something picturesque and romantic about the frontiersman which had always appealed to her imagination.  She had read a little of him and had seen a play in London the night she recognized Reggie from afar, where the scene was laid in the Far West.  On returning to the hotel she had looked with new interest at Eddie’s photograph and tried to picture him in the costume worn by the leading man.

But to find that her own brother, a man of education and refinement, actually worked with his own hands like a common laborer and—­what to Nora’s mind was infinitely more incomprehensible—­on a footing of perfect equality with his hired men, calling them familiarly by their given names and being called “Ed” in turn, was a distinctly disagreeable revelation.  That they should be familiar with Gertie was quite another matter.  Probably they were acquaintances of long standing dating back to her old hotel days.

Her sister-in-law, too, was absolutely different from the type she had imagined.  Always she had seen her as one of those vapid, pretty little creatures who had become old long before her time; peevish, spoiled, inclined to be flirtatious, refusing to give up her youth, still living in the recollection of her little day of triumph.

Gertie fulfilled only one of these conditions.  She was a small woman, not nearly so tall as Nora herself.  In all else she was as different as possible from what she had imagined.  There could never have been anything of the ‘clinging vine’ about Gertie.  As a girl she might have been handsome in an almost masculine way; pretty, in the generally accepted sense, she could never have been.

Her one coquetry seemed to be in the matter of shoes.  Her feet were unbelievably small.  Nora divined that she was inordinately proud of them.  While always scrupulously neat, she was apparently indifferent to clothes so long as they were clean and not absolutely shabby.  But her high-heeled shoes were the smartest that could be had from Winnipeg.