That they should discuss their relation as candidly as they sustained it was perhaps a little peculiar to them, so I have laid stress on it; but it was not by any means their sole preoccupation.  They talked like tried friends of their every-day affairs.  Indeed, after the trouble and intoxication of their great understanding had spent itself, it was the small practical interests of life that seemed to hold them most.  One might think that Nature, having made them her invitation upon the higher plane, abandoned them in the very scorn of her success to the warm human commonplaces that do her work well enough with the common type.  Mrs Murchison would have thought better of them if she had chanced again to overhear.

“I wouldn’t advise you to have it lined with fur,” Advena was saying.  The winter had sharply announced itself, and Finlay, to her reproach about his light overcoat, had declared his intention of ordering a buffalo-skin the following day.  “And the buffaloes are all gone, you know—­thirty years ago,” she laughed.  “You really are not modern in practical matters.  Does it ever surprise you that you get no pemmican for dinner, and hardly ever meet an Indian in his feathers?”

He looked at her with delight in his sombre eyes.  It was a new discovery, her capacity for happily chaffing him, only revealed since she had come out of her bonds to love; it was hard to say which of them took the greater pleasure in it.

“What is the use of living in Canada if you can’t have fur on your clothes?” he demanded.

“You may have a little—­astrakhan, I would—­on the collar and cuffs,” she said.  “A fur lining is too hot if there happens to be a thaw, and then you would leave it off and take cold.  You have all the look,” she added, with a gravely considering glance at him, “of a person who ought to take care of his chest.”

He withdrew his eyes hurriedly, and fixed them instead on his pipe.  He always brought it with him, by her order, and Advena usually sewed.  He thought as he watched her that it made the silences enjoyable.

“And expensive, I dare say, too,” he said.

“Yes, more or less.  Alec paid fifty dollars for his, and never liked it.”

“Fifty dollars—­ten pounds!  No vair for me!” he declared.  “By the way, Mrs Firmin is threatening to turn me out of house and home.  A married daughter is coming to live with her, and she wants my rooms.”

“When does she come—­the married daughter?”

“Oh, not till the early spring!  There’s no immediate despair,” said Finlay, “but it is dislocating.  My books and I had just succeeded in making room for one another.”

“But you will have to move, in any case, in the early spring.”

“I suppose I will.  I had—­I might have remembered that.”

“Have you found a house yet?” Advena asked him.

“No.”

“Have you been looking?” It was a gentle, sensible reminder.