"For nothing! You leave me your debtor! You pay me a thousand times! You have given back to me a purpose in life--an excuse for being alive! Ah, Miss Lane, you do not know--yet--how empty a life can be. But you are an artist, and some day you will dip your brush in pain--perhaps in sorrow and regret--and after that you will _paint_. It is the law." Jean told me these things that Sunday afternoon, and asked me if I knew what he meant. I did not; but I knew the artist had given Jean an instant's glimpse into life, and it was none the easier for me to suggest the loneliness of a homestead "somewhere west of Manitoba." "Do you think you could dip your brush in--in the Saskatchewan?" I ventured. She was gazing dreamily across the still river, and in the rich draperies of Autumn which were mirrored at her feet there was no fairer flower than Jean. She was the centre of a painting set against a background of nature's gorgeousness. "I know," she said, simply. "Jack has told me. I will go, if you--and Marjorie--go." It seemed to me that the reference to Marjorie came almost as a second thought; at any rate, I flattered myself with that idea. We had no difficulty in persuading my father and Mrs. Lane to fall in with our ideas; in fact, they accepted our plan with some enthusiasm. Father even insisted upon selling one of the farms and giving the proceeds to establish ourselves in the West. It was little enough, as we were to learn in due course, but Jack and I had also saved something of our earnings, and during this particular fall and winter we were unusually penurious. "Nail down every dollar," said Jack, and we all were busy with our nailing. We had decided to make no start until the spring; this on the advice of Mr. Edgar Gaines, a young man of the town who had gone west three years before with his worldly belongings in a grain bag, and had returned wearing tailor-made clothes and a horse-shoe tie pin set with something which, in a favorable light, resembled a diamond. He had "proved up" and sold out, and was living a lordly life on the proceeds--while they lasted. "I'm settling with myself for three years on the 'bald-headed', and I've run up quite a bill," was Mr. Gaines' explanation of his gaiety. But he was able to give us some suggestions born of experience. "No use going in the winter," he explained, "nor too early in the spring. You can't see land until the snow is off. And you have to _see_ it; otherwise you may take up a fine alkali mine. I took up my claim in winter. That's why I had to sell it in winter." "But don't you have to be there to put a crop in in the spring?" asked Jack, who was eager to be away.