AS the days were told off one by one in anticipation of the arrival of Trenholme Dare, the young architect and landscape gardener of Montreal, with his army of workmen, Louise became more conspicuously reticent, more conspicuously addicted to her books on socialism and metaphysics, her chats with the wives of luckless ranchers, her Quixotic jaunts north, south, east, and west in search of lonely school-teachers to be befriended, sick cattle to be disinfected, odd lots of provisions to be acquired from hard-up settlers. On the very day that a site was to be chosen for the foundation of her private greenhouse, she fled from Hillside and rode sixteen miles over the muddy roads of early spring for a mere ice-cream soda; yet when she had heard of the recurrence of little Annie Brown's chronic earache, she had foregone a dance at the Valley to sit up all night and heat linseed oil, smooth pillows, and sing old French ditties.
She realized the extent of her hostility to Keble's plans one day when a particular adverb escaped from her subconsciousness apropos of her husband's look of boyish pleasure and surprise, a sort of diffident
