The aunt stretched out an
approving finger to the sound. She realized that the figure round which
her arms hung trembled, for it was the "through" daily train for
Montreal.
"I'm going back at once, aunty," Junia said.
..........................
"Well, I'm jiggered!"
These were Tarboe's words when Carnac's candidature came first to him in
the press.
"He's 'broke' out in a new place," he added.
Tarboe loved the spectacular, and this was indeed spectacular. Yet he
had not the mental vision of Junia who saw how close, in one intimate
sense, was the relation between the artist life and the political life.
To him it was a gigantic break from a green pasture into a red field of
war. To her, it was a resolution which, in anyone else's life, would
have seemed abnormal; in Carnac's life it had naturalness.
Tarboe had been for a few months only the reputed owner of the great
business, and he had paid a big price for his headship in the weighty
responsibility, the strain of control; but it had got into his blood,
and he felt life would not be easy without it now.
Besides, there was Junia. To him she was the one being in the world
worth struggling for; the bird to be caught on the wing, or coaxed into
the nest, or snared into the net; and two of the three things he had
tried without avail. The third--the snaring? He would not stop at that,
if it would bring him what he wanted.
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