Chapter VIII. You Forgot Me

The Lakeside House, substantially built of logs, with "frame" kitchen attached, stood cosily among the clump of trees, poplar and spruce, locally described as a bluff. The bluff ran down to the little lake a hundred yards away, itself an expansion of Wolf Willow Creek. The whitewashed walls gleaming through its festoons of Virginia creeper, a little lawn bordered with beds filled with hollyhocks, larkspur, sweet-william and other old-fashioned flowers and flanked by a heavy border of gorgeous towering sunflowers, gave a general air, not only of comfort and thrift, but of refinement as well, too seldom found in connection with the raw homesteads of the new western country.

At a little distance from the house, at the end of a lane leading through the bluff, were visible the stables, granary and other outhouses, with corral attached.

Within, the house fulfilled the promise of its external appearance and surroundings. There was dignity without stiffness, comfort without luxury, simplicity without any suggestion of the poverty that painfully obtrudes itself.

At the open window whose vine shade at once softened the light and invited the summer airs, sat Mrs. Gwynne, with her basket of mending at her side. Eight years of life on an Alberta ranch had set their mark upon her. The summers' suns and winters' frosts and the eternal summer and winter winds had burned and browned the soft, fair skin of her earlier days. The anxieties inevitable to the struggle with poverty had lined her face and whitened her hair. But her eyes shone still with the serene light of a soul that carries within it the secret of triumph over the carking cares of life.

Seated beside her was her eldest daughter Kathleen, sewing; and stretched upon the floor lay Nora, frankly idle and half asleep, listening to the talk of the other two. Their talk turned upon the theme never long absent from their thought--that of ways and means.

"Tell you what, Mummie," droned Nora, lazily extending her lithe young body to its utmost limits, "there is a simple way out of our never ending worries, namely, a man, a rich man, if handsome, so much the better, but rich he must be, for Kathleen. They say they are hanging round the Gateway City of the West in bunches. How about it, Kate?"

"My dear Nora," gently chided her mother, "I wish you would not talk in that way. It is not quite nice. In my young days--"

"In your young days I know just exactly what happened, Mother. There was always a long queue of eligible young men dangling after the awfully lovely young Miss Meredith, and before she was well out of her teens the gallant young Gwynne carried her off."

"We never talked about those things, my dear," said her mother, shaking her head at her.

"You didn't need to, Mother."

"Well, if it comes to that, Nora,"