"Plenty of time."
"I shall go home for a while, of course. The mater will luxuriate in a convalescent son! Then I must build up a practice in some growing city. A doctor goes to seed in the wilds; there is not enough to do. I begin to feel a need of work!"
"Work!" said Kitty, looking at his transparent hands with a smile of affectionate scorn.
"Doctoring's a great job!" said Ralph. "Where would you advise me to establish myself?"
"How should I know?" murmured Kitty, head averted.
"What kind of a place is Winnipeg?"
A slow crimson tide crept up from her neck to her forehead. Fortunately Ralph's eyes were closed. "A busy, ugly town," she said. "But it's growing very fast. They say it has a great future."
"As soon as I am on my feet I'll come up and look it over," he said.
He soon fell asleep again. Kitty leaned her arms on the rail, and gazed dreamily at the brown flood with its squadrons of foam vessels sailing demurely under the steamboat's counter; and at the shore with its endless procession of pine trees wrapped in the delicate veils of October. She chid herself for the little spring of happiness that welled in her breast, and sought to choke it with common sense, but it continually found new ways out.
Downstream she saw a canoe lying on a point, and behind it a thread of smoke ascending among the trees. They had seen no sign of humanity since they had left Silver Landing sixty miles upstream, and she waited curiously to see what manner of people these were. Presently she distinguished two figures, a man lying on the ground and a woman bending over the fire. The steamboat was travelling fast with the current and she had no sooner made them out than she was upon them. It was a point of rock, and they passed close enough to toss a biscuit ashore.