Mrs. Annersly glanced at Carrie, who, for some reason, did not meet her gaze. "I think you mentioned that you came from Montreal," she said. "You must have found it very different on the prairie." "I certainly did. I had never done anything useful or been without all the money I wanted when I married Tom Custer, who had gone out a year earlier. My friends were against it, and they would probably have been more so had they seen the Range as it was then. The house had three rooms to it, and one was built of sod, while all the first summer the rain ran in. Still we made out together, and got on little by little, struggling for everything. A new stove or set of indurated ware meant weeks of self-denial. Now I seem to have been pinching a lifetime, though I am only forty; but Tom was always kind, and I do not think I have ever been sorry." She lay still, nestling luxuriously in the softly padded chair, and through her worn face and hard hands the blurred stamp of refinement once more shone. It was twenty years since she had turned away from the brighter side of life, and, though she did not expect compassion, Eveline Annersly felt sorry for her. There was also a certain thoughtfulness in Carrie Leland's expression, which seemed to suggest that a comparison was forced upon her. Both of them realised that the wilderness is not subdued without a cost. Woman, it seemed, had her part in the tense struggle, too, and Mrs. Custer was one of the many of whom it can be said: "They also serve." "Have you ever been home since you were married?" asked Carrie. "Once," said Mrs. Custer, with a faint shadow in her face. "I never went again. The others were not the same, or perhaps I had changed, for they did not seem to understand me. My younger sisters were growing up, and they thought only of dances, sleigh-rides and nights on the toboggan-slides, as I suppose I did once. My dresses looked dowdy beside theirs, too, and they told me I was getting too serious. I felt myself a stranger in the house where I was born. One, it seems, loses touch so soon." Again she stopped and laughed. "One night something was said that hurt me, and I think I lay awake and cried for hours as I realised that I could never quite bridge the gulf that had opened up between the rest and me. Then I remembered that Tom, who had worked harder than ever to raise the wheat that sent me there, wanted me always--and I went back to him."