than on canvas; it was also contrary to her excellent judgment that any wife should keep her husband. Accordingly, she sold out, and took a farm in quite another neighbourhood, a Prohibition one; and there Martin, who had been brought up in the country, took to farming, made, with her help, quite a success of it, and entirely lived down whatever was amiss in his Kiteroa reputation.
He became, of course, extremely popular in the new neighbourhood, for that he would be bound to do wherever he went; but whisky never got the upper hand of him again, save once, and that was during the horror of despair—when the first baby came and Avis was pronounced dying. They say it was to a whisper of his condition that she really owed her marvellous recovery; she was so resolved he should be kept straight. Certainly, by her understanding of the needs of Martin the man, she made of him a clear gain for humanity: although whether, at the same time, by her lack of sympathy with Martin the artist, she did not also inflict a certain loss upon it, who shall say? Decidedly, his sketches (there are several of them in the old kitchen still) possessed plenty of breadth and spirit. Martin is happy enough, by all accounts, and at all events his neighbourhood is saved from at least one pied verandah; but I always feel a little rueful and regretful about beauty-loving, beauty-bringing Martin. Avis saved so much, one wishes she could have saved more.
And so the old kitchen lost its transitory brightness, and lapsed into solitude and silence once more. It was scarcely less silent for its next occupant. A certain “Mr. Miller,” a foreigner, had,
