Monica was in no mood to answer his questions.
"Take them back," she said sharply.
As the boy slouched off she leaned back in her chair with a sigh of relief. She had done her best to put the man calling himself Tug off the track of his quarry.
PART II
CHAPTER I
AFTER EIGHTEEN YEARS
Monica Hanson stood in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom. For a long time she stood viewing her fair reflection with a smile at once half humorous, half tearful.
Thirty-five!
It sounded terrible as she muttered the age she knew herself to be. Thirty-five! Yet the perfect blue eyes were not a day older, as they looked back at her out of the glass. There was no hardening in their depths; there were no gathering lines about their fringed lids. Perhaps there was a deeper, wiser look in them; a look suggesting a wider knowledge, a more perfect sympathy with the life into which they had peeped during her years of struggling. But there was no aging in them. The rich, ripe mouth, too, so wonderfully firm, yet gentle, the broad, intelligent forehead with its fair, even brows. There was not one single unsightly line to disfigure these features which displayed so much of the strong character which lay behind them. Her wealth of fair, wavy hair, which since her earliest days had been her one little conceit, her constant joy and pride, was faultlessly dressed, nor had she ever yet found in its midst one of those silver threads whose discovery never fails to strike terror into the heart of an aging woman.
No, she beheld nothing in her reflection to cause her a single pang, a single heartache. Yet her heart was aching; and the pain of it was in the smile which came back to her from her reflection.
Had Monica only known it, the years had been more than kind to her. With a little more womanly vanity she would have understood that her girlish attractions had been increased a hundredfold. Not only had the years matured her figure to perfections which can never belong to early youth, but they had endowed her with a beauty of soul and mind, far more rarely found in one of such unusual physical attraction.
But such ponderings before her glass were useless, perhaps harmful. It was all so impossible. So she turned away with a little impatient gesture, and, picking up the letter lying on her bed, she passed through the folding doors into her sitting-room beyond.
The winter sun was shining in through frosty windows; that wonderful winter sun which brightens and makes joyous the Canadian dead season, without shedding sufficient warmth to disturb the thermometer from its despairing depths of cold.
She crossed to the window, and stood beside the heat radiator while she read her letter for perhaps the twentieth time. It was quite short, and intensely characteristic of the writer. Monica understood this. The lack of effusion in no way blinded her to the stormy passion which had inspired it.
"Dear Monica:
"I am going to call on you at 4 o'clock this afternoon, if you have no objection. If you have, 'phone me. I simply cannot rest until the subject of our talk the other night is settled.
"Yours,
"Alexander Hendrie."
There was a wistful longing in her eyes as the woman looked up from the brief note. The subject of their talk. He could not rest. Had she rested, or known peace of mind since that evening? She knew she had not. She knew that come what might that calm which belongs to a heart untouched by love could never again be hers. She knew that love, at last, had come knocking at the door of her soul; nor had it knocked in vain, in spite of the impossibility of it all. She had not 'phoned. Instead she had spent two hours over her toilet to receive the man who was her employer, and had now become her lover.
No one knew better than she the happiness that might have been hers in her newly found regard for this great wheat grower of Alberta, had things only been different. She loved him; she had admired him ever since she came into his employ, but now she loved him with all the long-pent passion of a woman who has for years deliberately shut the gates of her soul to all such feelings.
She knew her love must be denied. There was no hope for it.
The trials she had gone through for the sake of her pledge to her dying sister were far too vividly in her mind to leave her with any hope for this love of hers. She must crush it out. She must once more steel herself, that her faith with the dead might be kept.
She dropped upon the ottoman beside the window, and, gazing out on Winnipeg's busy main street, gave herself up to profound thought. Her incisive brain swiftly became busy, reviewing the career which had been hers since – since young Frank, her beloved boy, the child who had cost her a sister's life, had become her one object and care.
Her deep eyes grew introspective, and her pretty lips closed firmly.
She had not traveled an easy road during those years. Far from it. The rocks prophesied by the kindly doctor had been quickly realized. They had come well-nigh to wrecking her craft at the outset. Only that its ribs were so stout, and the heart that guided it so strong, it must inevitably have been doomed.
So much for her youthful conceit; so much for the boundless optimism of her years. She was caught among the very first shoals that presented themselves in the ebb tide of her fortunes six months before the completion of her contract on the Daily Citizen. Would she ever forget the – yes, tragedy of that moment? She thought not.
Everything had gone along so smoothly. Her fears had been lulled. There was no sign to point the coming of the disaster. Yes, that was it. There had been overconfidence. The complications at her sister's death had been forgotten. There had been no unpleasant developments to remind her of the pitfalls with which she was surrounded. So she had grown careless in her confidence. In the warmth of her girl's heart, her rapidly growing love for the little life in her charge, she found herself spending every moment of her spare time with the child she intended to teach to call her "mother."
They were happy days. The joy of them still remained. Nor, for all the trouble they had caused her, did she regret a single one of them. But her indiscretion grew, and so the blow fell.
It was on a Sunday. In the afternoon. She remembered it well; a glorious sunny day in early summer. She was pushing the baby coach along the sidewalk of the broad country road toward the city. She had paused to readjust the sunshade over the child's head. When she looked up it was to discover a light, top buggy, drawn by a fast trotter, rapidly approaching. Mr. Meakin was driving it, and beside him sat his little, chapel-going wife.
They saw her and promptly pulled up; and instantly Monica knew that trouble was knocking at her door. Mrs. Meakin did not like her. She did not approve of her husband's secretary; and Mrs. Meakin was one of those narrow, straight-laced puritans, who never cease to thank Providence that they are so pure.
"Why, it's Miss Hanson," she promptly exclaimed. "And – oh, the lovely baby. Why – " She looked at Monica's scarlet face and broke off.
Mr. Meakin took up the greeting in the cordial fashion of a man who is well disposed.
"Say, Miss Hanson, it's a hot day for you to be pushing that coach. You surely ought to be around an ice cream parlor with one of your beaus. Not out airing some friend's kid."
But Monica's confusion only increased under the sharp eyes of Mrs. Meakin, which never left her face.
"A baby can't have too much of this beautiful air," she said helplessly.
"Why doesn't its mother look after it?" demanded Mrs. Meakin.
"She's – she's busy."
Monica's attempts at evasion were so feeble, she had so little love for subterfuge, that, to a mind as prone to suspicion as Mrs. Meakin's, the word "mystery" quickly presented itself.
"Whose is it?"
The inevitable question seemed to thunder into the wretched girl's ears.
Whose is it? Whose is it? It was useless to lie to this woman, whom she knew had no love for her. So on the spur