But I felt like having a good cry over it all -- and I had it . I was glad for my dearie 's sake and Owen 's ; but Mark Foster had paid the price of their joy , and I knew it had beggared him of happiness for life . XV . TANNIS OF THE FLATS Few people in Avonlea could understand why Elinor Blair had never married . She had been one of the most beautiful girls in our part of the Island and , as a woman of fifty , she was still very attractive . In her youth she had had ever so many beaux , as we of our generation well remembered ; but , after her return from visiting her brother Tom in the Canadian Northwest , more than twenty-five years ago , she had seemed to withdraw within herself , keeping all men at a safe , though friendly , distance . She had been a gay , laughing girl when she went West ; she came back quiet and serious , with a shadowed look in her eyes which time could not quite succeed in blotting out . Elinor had never talked much about her visit , except to describe the scenery and the life , which in that day was rough indeed . Not even to me , who had grown up next door to her and who had always seemed more a sister than a friend , did she speak of other than the merest commonplaces . But when Tom Blair made a flying trip back home , some ten years later , there were one or two of us to whom he related the story of Jerome Carey , -- a story revealing only too well the reason for Elinor 's sad eyes and utter indifference to masculine attentions . I can recall almost his exact words and the inflections of his voice , and I remember , too , that it seemed to me a far cry from the tranquil , pleasant scene before us , on that lovely summer day , to the elemental life of the Flats . The Flats was a forlorn little trading station fifteen miles up the river from Prince Albert , with a scanty population of half-breeds and three white men . When Jerome Carey was sent to take charge of the telegraph office there , he cursed his fate in the picturesque language permissible in the far Northwest . Not that Carey was a profane man , even as men go in the West . He was an English gentleman , and he kept both his life and his vocabulary pretty clean . But -- the Flats ! Outside of the ragged cluster of log shacks , which comprised the settlement , there was always a shifting fringe of teepees where the Indians , who drifted down from the Reservation , camped with their dogs and squaws and papooses . There are standpoints from which Indians are interesting , but they can not be said to offer congenial social attractions . For three weeks after Carey went to the Flats he was lonelier than he had ever imagined it possible to be , even in the Great Lone Land . If it had not been for teaching Paul Dumont the telegraphic code , Carey believed he would have been driven to suicide in self-defense .
The telegraphic importance of the Flats consisted XXXXX the fact that it was the starting point of three telegraph lines to remote trading posts up North .
If as before for from in of over than to