“Really, it’s all very romantic, isn’t it?  I suppose it’s better as it is, all things considered.  Mark behaved splendidly, didn’t he?  Not many men would have done as he did.”

For once in my life I agreed with Isabella.  But I felt like having a good cry over it all—­and I had it.  I was glad for my dearie’s sake and Owen’s; but Mark Foster had paid the price of their joy, and I knew it had beggared him of happiness for life.

XV.  TANNIS OF THE FLATS

Few people in Avonlea could understand why Elinor Blair had never married.  She had been one of the most beautiful girls in our part of the Island and, as a woman of fifty, she was still very attractive.  In her youth she had had ever so many beaux, as we of our generation well remembered; but, after her return from visiting her brother Tom in the Canadian Northwest, more than twenty-five years ago, she had seemed to withdraw within herself, keeping all men at a safe, though friendly, distance.  She had been a gay, laughing girl when she went West; she came back quiet and serious, with a shadowed look in her eyes which time could not quite succeed in blotting out.

Elinor had never talked much about her visit, except to describe the scenery and the life, which in that day was rough indeed.  Not even to me, who had grown up next door to her and who had always seemed more a sister than a friend, did she speak of other than the merest commonplaces.  But when Tom Blair made a flying trip back home, some ten years later, there were one or two of us to whom he related the story of Jerome Carey,—­a story revealing only too well the reason for Elinor’s sad eyes and utter indifference to masculine attentions.  I can recall almost his exact words and the inflections of his voice, and I remember, too, that it seemed to me a far cry from the tranquil, pleasant scene before us, on that lovely summer day, to the elemental life of the Flats.

The Flats was a forlorn little trading station fifteen miles up the river from Prince Albert, with a scanty population of half-breeds and three white men.  When Jerome Carey was sent to take charge of the telegraph office there, he cursed his fate in the picturesque language permissible in the far Northwest.

Not that Carey was a profane man, even as men go in the West.  He was an English gentleman, and he kept both his life and his vocabulary pretty clean.  But—­the Flats!

Outside of the ragged cluster of log shacks, which comprised the settlement, there was always a shifting fringe of teepees where the Indians, who drifted down from the Reservation, camped with their dogs and squaws and papooses.  There are standpoints from which Indians are interesting, but they cannot be said to offer congenial social attractions.  For three weeks after Carey went to the Flats he was lonelier than he had ever imagined it possible to be, even in the Great Lone Land.  If it had not been for teaching Paul Dumont the telegraphic code, Carey believed he would have been driven to suicide in self-defense.