That was where Abe’s sister lived; and the store was the Vanbruik Department Store, owned by her husband and managed by a high-salaried young man, Mr. Diamond.

Abe was very fond of his sister Mary; he wished he had sent her a wire message announcing his arrival so that she might have met him. A frown settled on his large round face, under the peak of the grey tweed cap which he wore. If he hesitated about calling at the house, it was on account of his brother-in-law, the mysterious doctor who a few years ago had suddenly given up his large flourishing practice at Somerville to turn merchant. Coming as Abe did from a small Ontario farm, inherited five years ago from his father who had died a sudden death, and now advantageously sold to an industrial concern, Abe had the prejudice of the man who made his living by what he called “work” against the merchant who made “money” by calculation. Besides, Dr. Vanbruik was in everything Abe’s antipode, physically as well as temperamentally. The mere fact that the doctor was a professional man had seemed to place Abe at a disadvantage in what little intercourse they had had. The doctor was a graduate of Queen’s; and Kingston stood, to Abe, for all that was provincial in the spirit of Ontario; it seemed strangely eastern; it represented all that Abe had abandoned in coming west. Abe had deliberately chosen the material world for the arena of his struggles; the doctor, though he had turned merchant, seemed to live in a world of the spirit. Mary had, with Abe’s own early consent, received a high-school and college education as the equivalent of her equity in the farm, there being only two children. The cost of her education had been defrayed by placing a mortgage of five thousand dollars on the parental place. Mary, too, therefore, was in a sense Abe’s superior, though Abe was fully aware of the difference between an informational education and native intelligence, in which latter he did not feel himself to be deficient. Yet he could not help begrudging his sister that refinement of manners and forms which is imparted by the association with cultured men and women; he begrudged it while secretly admiring and imitating it. This was all the more the case with his brother-in-law, who had a way of quietly listening to an argument and then settling it by a display of superior information.

Physically, Abe was extraordinarily tall, measuring six feet four; the doctor was almost correspondingly small, for he lacked an exact twelve inches of Abe’s stature. Abe was built in proportion to his height, broad-shouldered and deep-chested; the doctor was slender and fine-limbed, and yet he stooped. Temperamentally, Abe was impulsive, bearing down obstacles by sheer impetuosity; the doctor was deliberate, hesitant even, weighing every aspect of a matter before aligning himself. Consequently, at the age of thirty, with his life a blank page before him, Abe was disinclined to seek the company of this man who, besides, was his senior by fifteen years, having lived his life.

The struggle between Abe’s desire to let his sister help him over the next hour or so and his disinclination to meet his brother-in-law was plainly visible in his face, which, above any pair of shoulders but his, would have looked disproportionately large. And there was still another reason for his hesitancy. Before leaving Ontario Abe had married Ruth, against the, at least implied, advice of Mary and her husband. When, a year ago, he had mentioned his intention, neither had voiced any open disapproval; but, in the course of the few weeks which he had spent at Morley, they had somehow conveyed a lack of enthusiasm over it, now by a silence, now by a hesitant question. “Will she be able to adapt herself to rural conditions?” “Won’t she suffer from the unavoidable isolation on a pioneer farm?” For Ruth was the daughter of small-town merchants; her father had a bake-shop at Brantford; her mother, a confectionery operated in conjunction. The worst of it was that Abe himself had his misgivings when he pondered the matter; to have his own unvoiced fears put forward by others, if ever so tentatively, disconcerted him. The conclusion could not be evaded that he had been in love with a face and a figure rather than a mind or soul.

Yet he strode impulsively forward at last, diagonally crossing the sleepy street of the ugly village and hoping that his brother-in-law would not be at home.

That hope was fulfilled. His sister met him in the door of the wide-spaced living-room in the white house which was surrounded by an extensive veranda. At sight of her brother, Mary exclaimed:

“Abe!…Why in the world did you not let me know?”

Abe shrugged his shoulders; but he bent down and kissed her cheek.

“Charles isn’t in,” Mary said. “He went to the city on business.”

Mary, too, was tall, even somewhat large and rather heavy.

“I’m in town only for an hour or so,” Abe said as they were sitting down–Abe on the large, grey chesterfield, his sister in an arm-chair of the same colour and design. “I have my stuff in the train and I’m going out at once.”

“Surely not,” Mary said, scanning his face through her glasses. “Or do you intend to come back to-night?”

“I don’t think so. I want to start work.”

“Not to-day, Abe?”

“Not to-day, perhaps.