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The Perversity of Fate
From the Picture Play by Taylor White
In which the reader is taken from the city streets to the Canadian wilds, and is once more shown that Fate is a fickle jade who disarranges even the best laid plans
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" A nd you 'll wait, dear — even tho /\ the time seems long?" 1 % Marion Marlow glanced at the thin gold circlet that was the sole ornament of her slim, capable fingers. It was characteristic of John Rose that he should ask Marion to marry him, even while confessing that he could not afford a diamond ring as the pledge of his troth.
"I'll wait," she promised, with a little shudder that caused her to nestle more closely against the powerfully muscled shoulder, "but Quebec is such a long way from here, Jack." ' ' Not so far as the Michigan camps, ' ' he declared lightly, "and I stand a better chance. I'm not fitted for the city, it's too big and too small at the same time."
Marion nodded understandingly. A few years before he had come to New York to make his way — one of the thousands who annually set forth to conquer — and Rose had been one of the conquered. He longed for the freedom of the lumber camps, the wide, open spaces of the woods, and he lacked the aggressiveness that forces men ahead where opportunities are few and applicants many. He was not content to be a clerk in a store, yet he could not advance himself.
Marion herself had done much setter. From file clerk she had worked her advancement until now she was James Elrood's confidential secretary, quiet, alert to her employer 's interest,
and never forgetful of her duties. She was making more money than Jack, and it was partly this thought that drove him back to the woods when the offer came from the Elk River Company's foreman. In the woods he could earn enough to support a wife and family. In the city he never could hope to gain the advance.
And so he went back to the Canadian forests, where, with each stroke of his keen-bladed axe, he liked to think that he was carving out the home that he should make for Marion and her mother ; and Marion, in the city, went quietly about her work making herself more and more valuabla to Elrood.
Jack's letters carried small encouragement. Several times it seemed as tho promotion were in his grasp, but always there came the unexpected — once a touch of fever, once a broken arm, but always when he came back there was a new foreman in charge of the camp and Chance had again passed him by.
"It's the perversity of Fate," Jack wrote. "Some time, when I do not need the luck, it will come. And when I see Royston and his family I envv them."
The words came back to Marion one night as she sat in her cold room and counted and recounted her slender resources. All summer her mother had been slowly failing, and now the great specialist to whom she had gone
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