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294
THE LAW-BRINGERS

have been melodrama in another woman but was pure natural abandonment in Grange's Andree.

"Put your hand on to me," she sobbed. "Put your hand—an' say you love me. Dick! Dick! Not to make me go like this. Not to be cruel—all in one togezzer. Dick—it make me kill some place inside."

Apart from the real pity and shame in him his natural instinct for analysis was awake. He had not dreamed that there was anything in the girl which could suffer like this. She clung to him, hiding her face against him, and she shook them both with her wild sobbing. He drew a hard breath, standing quite still, and looking at this thing as his mind showed it.

It was inevitable that he should break Andree here, because Andree stood for the primitive, the savage; for the primal thing which has to be done away with before the march of progress. She was the Canada of the unformed, the undisciplined, the uncivilised. And, being so, she had to make way for the needs and desires of the white man who peoples the world in the place of the native-born. For always, over the face of the earth, go the white men; fulfilling their destiny; destroying the lesser within or without the law; taking that which they can never replace; but obeying, even as the lesser animal obeys, that great merciless inscrutable Power which has made of the white race rulers, founders, destroyers; the builders-up of new dynasties; the devourers of the old.

Tempest stood for the new dynasty; for the race of the future; for a link in the long chain wherewith the white man buckles the earth to himself. And Andree stood for the old dynasty; the thing which must die; the thing to be trodden hard that the roots of the new-planted tree should stand firm in it. This was the law of life; the law of eternity. It was the ever-mutable. Now out of which the Future is shaped. All mankind were governed alike by that law. There was no escape. But, with those young arms gripped about him, Dick did not feel competent to lay the whole blame on the natural evolution of destiny.

Andree drew herself up against him; lifting her quivering lips.

"Not to love me, perhaps," she said. "But to let me