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Hawtrey's Deputy

by Harold Bindloss · English · Gutenberg #27601 · 618,215 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Hawtrey's Deputy

Author: Harold Bindloss

Illustrator: Cyrus Cuneo


        
Release date: December 23, 2008 [eBook #27601]
                Most recently updated: January 4, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27601

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HAWTREY'S DEPUTY ***




Produced by Al Haines










[Frontispiece: "In another moment Wyllard's last doubt vanished, and he
sprang forward with a gasp."   (CHAPTER XXVIII.)]






HAWTREY'S DEPUTY


BY

HAROLD BINDLOSS



_Author of "The Impostor," "The Liberationist," etc._




Illustrated by

Cyrus Cuneo




WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED

LONDON, MELBOURNE AND TORONTO

1910




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER

      I.--SALLY CREIGHTON
     II.--SALLY TAKES CHARGE
    III.--WYLLARD ASSENTS
     IV.--A CRISIS
      V.--THE OLD COUNTRY
     VI.--HER PICTURE
    VII.--AGATHA DOES NOT FLINCH
   VIII.--THE TRAVELLING COMPANION
     IX.--THE FOG
      X.--DISILLUSION
     XI.--AGATHA'S DECISION
    XII.--WANDERERS
   XIII.--THE SUMMONS
    XIV.--AGATHA PROVES OBDURATE
     XV.--THE BEACH
    XVI.--THE FIRST ICE
   XVII.--DEFEAT
  XVIII.--A DELICATE ERRAND
    XIX.--THE PRIOR CLAIM
     XX.--THE FIRST STAKE
    XXI.--GREGORY MAKES UP HIS MIND
   XXII.--A PAINFUL REVELATION
  XXIII.--THROUGH THE SNOW
   XXIV.--THE LANDING
    XXV.--NEWS OF DISASTER
   XXVI.--THE RESCUE
  XXVII.--IN THE WILDERNESS
 XXVIII.--THE UNEXPECTED
   XXIX.--CAST AWAY
    XXX.--THE LAST EFFORT
   XXXI.--WYLLARD COMES HOME




ILLUSTRATIONS


"In another moment Wyllard's last doubt vanished, and he sprang forward
with a gasp." . . . . . . _Frontispiece_

"She could not raise him wholly, and he cried out once when his injured
leg trailed in the snow."

"Then she turned to Sproatly.  'You can wash up those dishes on the
table.'"

"At length the door opened, and Agatha Ismay, wrapped in a long cloak,
came in."

"'Now,' he said, 'I won't let you fall.'"

"'You!' was all she said."

"In another moment Hawtrey sprang up on the platform, and she felt his
arms about her."

"Then something seemed to crack, and she saw the off-side horse stumble
and plunge."

"'Do you think--that--would have mattered?'"

"'Well,' she said, 'we have driven over as we promised!'"

"Agatha held her hands up ... as the man leaned down, and the next
moment she was strongly lifted."

"'I guess I needn't tell you where that is,' he said, and pointed to
the parallel of latitude that ran across."

"It seemed that he did not immediately notice her."

"'Are these things very much too big for you, Sally?'"

"It shambled forward in a curious manner."

"'I thought you might save Gregory, if I told you.'"

"'I was waiting for you,' she said simply."




HAWTREY'S DEPUTY.


CHAPTER I.

SALLY CREIGHTON.

The frost outside was bitter, and the prairie, which rolled back from
Lander's in long undulations to the far horizon, gleamed white beneath
the moon, but there was warmth and brightness in Stukely's wooden barn.
It stood at one end of the little, desolate settlement, where the trail
that came up from the railroad thirty miles away forked off into two
wavy ribands that melted into a waste of snow.  Lander's consisted then
of five or six frame houses and stores, a hotel of the same material,
several sod stables, and a few birch-log barns; and its inhabitants
considered it one of the most promising places in Western Canada.
That, however, is the land of promise, a promise that is in due time
usually fulfilled, and the men of Lander's were, for the most part,
shrewdly practical optimists.  They made the most of a somewhat grim
and frugal present, and staked all they had to give--the few dollars
they had brought in with them, and their powers of enduring toil--upon
the roseate future.

Stukely had given them, and their scattered neighbours, who had driven
there across several leagues of prairie, a supper in his barn, and a
big rusty stove, which had been brought in for the occasion, stood in
the midst of it.  Its pipe glowed in places a dull red, and Stukely now
and then wondered uneasily whether it was charring a larger hole
through the shingles of the roof.  On one side of the stove the floor
had been cleared; on the other benches, empty barrels, and tables were
huddled together, and such of the guests as were not at the moment
dancing sat upon them indiscriminately.  A keg of hard Ontario cider
had been provided for their refreshment, and it was open to anybody to
ladle up what he wanted with a tin dipper, while a haze of tobacco
smoke drifted in thin blue wisps beneath the big nickelled lamps.  In
addition to the reek of it, the place was filled with the smell of hot
iron which an over-driven stove gives out, and the subtle odours of old
skin coats.

The guests, however, were accustomed to an atmosphere of that kind, and
it did not trouble them.  For the most part, they were lean and spare,
bronzed by frost and snow-blink, and straight of limb, for, though
scarcely half of them were Canadian born, the prairie, as a rule,
swiftly sets its stamp upon the newcomer.  There was also something in
the way they held themselves and put their feet down that suggested
health and vigour, and, in the case of most of them, a certain
alertness and decision of character.  Some hailed from English cities,
a few from those of Canada, and some from the bush of Ontario; but
there was a similarity between them which the cut and tightness of
their store clothing did not altogether account for.  They lived well
if plainly, and toiled out in the open unusually hard.  Their eyes were
steady, their bronzed skin was clear, and their laughter had a
wholesome ring.

A fiery-haired Scot, a Highlander of the Isles, sat upon a barrel-head
sawing at a fiddle, and the shrill scream of it filled the barn.  Tone
he did not aspire to, but he played with Caledonian verve and swing,
and kept the snapping time.  It was mad, harsh music of the kind that
sets the blood tingling and the feet to move in rhythm, though the
exhilarating effect of it was rather spoiled by the efforts of the
little French Canadian who had another fiddle and threw in clanging
chords upon the lower strings.

They were dancing in the cleared space what was presumably a quadrille,
though it bore almost as great a resemblance to a Scottish country
dance, or indeed to one of the measures of Bretonne France, which was,
however, characteristic of the country.  The Englishman has set no
distinguishable impress upon the prairie.  It has absorbed him with his
reserve and sturdy industry, and the Canadian from the cities is
apparently lost in it, too, for theirs is the leaven that works through
the mass slowly and unobtrusively, and it is the Scot and the habitant
of French extraction who have given the life of it colour and
individuality.  Extremes meet and fuse on the wide white levels of the
West.

It was, however, an Englishman who was the life of that dance, and he
was physically a bigger man than most of the rest, for as a rule, at
least, the Colonial born run to wiry hardness rather than solidity of
frame.  Gregory Hawtrey was tall and thick of shoulder, though the rest
of him was in fine modelling, and he had a pleasant face of the English
blue-eyed type.  Just then it was suffused with almost boyish
merriment, and indeed an irresponsible gaiety was a salient
characteristic of the man.  One would have called him handsome, though
his mouth was a trifle slack, and there was a certain assurance in his
manner that just fell short of swagger.  He was the kind of man one
likes at first sight, but for all that not the kind his hard-bitten
neighbours would have chosen to stand by them through the strain of
drought and frost in adverse seasons.

As it happened, the grim, hard-faced Sager, who had come there from
Michigan, was just then talking to Stukely about him.

"Kind of tone about that man--guess he once had the gold-leaf on him
quite thick, and it hasn't all worn off yet," he said.  "Seen more
Englishmen like him, and some folks from Noo York, too, when I took
parties bass fishing way back yonder."

He waved his hand vaguely, as though to indicate the American Republic,
and Stukely agreed with him.  They were also right as far as they went,
for Hawtrey undoubtedly possessed a grace of manner which, however,
somehow failed to reach distinction.  It was, perhaps, just a little
too apparent, and lacked the strengthening feature of restraint.

"I wonder," said Stukely reflectively, "what those kind of fellows done
before they came out here."

He had expressed a curiosity which is now and then to be met with on
the prairie, but Sager, the charitable, grinned.

"Oh," he said, "I guess quite a few done no more than make their folks
on the other side tired of them, and that's why they sent them out to
you.  Some of them get paid so much on condition that they don't come
back again.  Say"--and he glanced towards the dancers--"Dick
Creighton's Sally seems quite stuck on Hawtrey by the way she's looking
at him."

Stukely assented.  He was a somewhat primitive person, as was Sally
Creighton, for that matter, and he did not suppose she would have been
greatly offended had she overheard his observations.

"Well," he said, "I've thought that, too.  If she wants him she'll get
him.  She's a smart girl--Sally."

There were not many women present--perhaps one to every two of the men,
which was, however, rather a large proportion in that country, and none
of their garments were particularly elegant.  The fabric was, for the
most part, the cheapest obtainable, and they had fashioned it with
their own fingers in the scanty interludes between washing, and baking,
and mending their husbands' or fathers' clothes.  Their faces were a
trifle sallow and had lost their freshness in the dry heat of the
stove.  Their hands were hard and reddened, and in figure most of them
were thin and spare.  One could have fancied that in a land where
everybody toiled strenuously their burden was the heavier.  One or two
of them had clearly been accustomed to a smoother life, but there was
nothing to suggest that they looked back to it with regret.  As a
matter of fact, they looked forward, working for the future, and there
was patient courage in their smiling eyes.

Creighton's Sally, who was then tripping through the measure on
Hawtrey's arm, was native born.  She was young and straight--straighter
in outline than the women of the cities--with a suppleness which was
less suggestive of the willow than a rather highly-tempered spring.
She moved with a large vigour which only just fell short of grace, her
eyes snapped when she smiled at Hawtrey, and her hair, which was of a
ruddy brown, had fiery gleams in it.  Anyone would have called her
comely, and there was, indeed, no women in Stukely's barn to compare
with her in that respect, which was a fact she recognised, while every
line and pose of her figure seemed expressive of an effervescent
vitality.

"Oh yes," said Sager reflectively; "she'll get him sure if she sets her
mind on it, and there's no denying that they make a handsome pair.
I've nothing against Hawtrey either: a straight man, a hustler, and
smart at handling a team.  Still, it's kind of curious that while the
man's never been stuck for the stamps like the rest of us, he's made
nothing very much of his homestead yet.  Now there's Bob, and Jake, and
Jasper came in after he did with half the dollars, and they thrash out
four bushels of hard wheat for Hawtrey's three."

Stukely made a little gesture of concurrence, for he dimly realised the
significance of his companion's speech.  It is results which count in
that country, where the one thing demanded is practical efficiency, and
the man of simple, steadfast purpose usually goes the farthest.
Hawtrey had graces which won him friends, boldness of conception, and
the power of application; but he had somehow failed to accomplish as
much as his neighbours did.  After all, there must be a good deal to be
said for the man who raises four bushels of good wheat where his
comrade with equal facilities raises three.

In the meanwhile Hawtrey was talking to Sally, and it was not
astonishing that they talked of farming, which is the standard topic on
that strip of prairie.

"So you're not going to break that new piece this spring?" she said.

"No," said Hawtrey; "I'd want another team, anyway, and I can't raise
the dollars; they're hard to get out here."

"Plenty under the sod," said Sally, who was essentially practical.
"That's where we get ours, but you have to put the breaker in and turn
it over.  You"--and she flashed a swift glance at him--"got most of
yours from England.  Won't they send you any more?"

Hawtrey's eyes twinkled as he shook his head.  "I'm afraid they won't,"
he said.  "You see, I've put the screw on them rather hard the last few
years."

"How did you do that?" said Sally.  "Told them you were thinking of
coming home again?"

There was a certain wryness in her companion's smile, for though
Hawtrey had cast no particular slur upon the family's credit he had
signally failed to enhance it, and he was quite aware that his English
relatives did not greatly desire his presence in the Old Country.

"My dear," he said, "you really shouldn't hit a fellow in the eye that
way."

As it happened, he did not see the girl's face just then, or he might
have noticed a momentary change in its expression.  Gregory Hawtrey was
a little casual in speech, but so far most of the young women he
bestowed an epithet of that kind upon had attached no significance to
it.  They had wisely decided that he did not mean anything.  In another
moment or two the Scottish fiddler's voice broke in.

"Can ye no' watch the music?  Noo it's paddybash!" he cried.

His French Canadian comrade waved his fiddle-bow protestingly.

"Paddybashy!  _V'la la belle chose!_" he said with ineffable contempt,
and broke in upon the ranting melody with a succession of harsh,
crashing chords.

Then it apparently became a contest as to which could drown the other's
instrument, and the snapping time grew faster, until the dancers
gasped, and men with long boots encouraged them with cries and stamped
a staccato accompaniment upon the benches or on the floor.  It was
savage, rasping music, but one player infused into it the ebullient
verve of France, and the other was from the misty land where the
fiddler learns the witchery of the clanging reel and the swing of the
Strathspey.  It is doubtless not high art, but there is probably no
music in the world that fires the blood like this and turns the sober
dance to rhythmic riot.  Perhaps, too, it gains something that gives it
a closer compelling grip amidst the prairie snow.

Hawtrey, at least, was breathless when it ceased, and Sally's eyes
flashed with the effulgence of the Northern night when her partner
found her a resting-place upon an upturned barrel.

"No," she said, "I won't have any cider."  She turned and glanced at
him imperiously.  "You're not going for any more either."

It was, no doubt, not the speech a well-trained English maiden would
have made, but, though Hawtrey smiled rather curiously, it fell
inoffensively from Sally's lips.  Though it is not always set down to
their credit, the brown-faced, hard-handed men as a rule live very
abstemiously in that country, and, as it happened, Hawtrey, who,
however, certainly showed no sign of it, had already consumed rather
more cider than anybody else.  He made a little sign of submission, and
Sally resumed their conversation where it had broken off.

"We could let you have our ox-team to do that breaking with," she said.
"You've had Sproatly living with you all winter.  Why don't you make
him stay and work out his keep?"

Hawtrey laughed.  "Sally," he said, "do you think anybody could make
Sproatly work?"

"It would be hard," the girl admitted, and then looked up at him with a
little glint in her eyes.  "Still, I'd put a move on him if you sent
him along to me."

She was a rather capable young woman, but Hawtrey was very dubious of
her ability to accomplish as much as this.  Sproatly was an Englishman
of good education, though his appearance seldom suggested it, who drove
about the prairie in a waggon vending cheap oleographs and patent
medicines most of the summer, and contrived to obtain free quarters
from his bachelor acquaintances during the winter.  It is a hospitable
country, but there were men round Lander's who when they went away to
work in far-off lumber camps, as they sometimes did, nailed up their
doors and windows to prevent Sproatly getting in.

"Does he never do anything?" Sally added.

"No," said Hawtrey; "at least, never when he can help it.  He had,
however, started something shortly before I left him.  You see, the
house has wanted cleaning the last month or two, and we tossed up for
who should do it.  It fell to Sproatly, who didn't seem quite pleased,
but he got as far as firing the chairs and tables out into the snow.
Then he sat down for a smoke, and he was looking at them through the
window when I drove away."

"Ah," said his companion, "you want somebody to keep the house straight
and look after you.  Didn't you know any nice girls back there in the
Old Country?"

It was spoken naturally, and there was nothing to show that the girl's
heart beat a little more rapidly than usual as she watched her
companion.  His face, however, grew a trifle graver, for she had
touched upon a rather momentous question to such men as him.  There are
a good many of them living in Spartan simplicity upon the prairie,
well-trained, well-connected young Englishmen, and others like them
from Canadian cities.  They naturally look for some grace of culture or
refinement in the woman they would marry, and there are few women of
the station they once belonged to who could face the loneliness and
unassisted drudgery that must be borne by the small wheat-grower's
wife.  There were also reasons why this question had been troubling
Hawtrey in particular of late.

"Oh, yes, one or two," he said.  "I'm not quite sure, however, that
girls of that kind would find things even moderately comfortable here."

There was a certain reflectiveness in his tone, which, since it seemed
to indicate that he had already given the point some consideration,
jarred upon his companion.  She had also an ample share of the Western
farmer's pride, which firmly declines to believe that there is any land
to compare with the one the plough is slowly wresting from the wide
white levels of the prairie.

"We make out well enough," she said with a snap in her eyes.

Hawtrey made a little whimsical gesture.  "Oh, yes," he admitted; "it's
in you.  All you want to beat the wilderness and turn it into a garden
is an axe, a span of oxen, and a breaker plough.  You ought to be proud
of it.  Still, you see, our folks back yonder aren't quite the same as
you."

Sally partly understood him.  "Ah," she said, "they want more, and,
perhaps, they're used to having more than we have; but isn't that in
one way their misfortune?  Is it what folks want, or what they can do,
that makes them of use to anybody else?"

There was a hard truth in her suggestion, but Hawtrey, who seldom
occupied himself with matters of that kind, smiled.

"Oh," he said, "I don't know; but, after all, it wouldn't be worth
while our raising wheat here unless there were folks back East to eat
it, and if some of them only eat it in the shape of dainty cakes that
doesn't affect the question.  Anyway, there's only another dance or
two, and I was wondering whether I could drive you home; I've got
Wyllard's Ontario sleigh."

Sally glanced at him rather sharply.  She had half-expected this offer,
and it is possible would have judiciously led him up to it if he had
not made it.  Now, as she saw that he really wished to drive her home,
she was glad that she had not done so.

"Yes," she said softly, "I think you could."

"Then," said Hawtrey, "if you'll wait ten minutes I'll be back with the
team."




CHAPTER II.

SALLY TAKES CHARGE.

The night was clear and bitterly cold when Hawtrey and Sally Creighton
drove away from Stukely's barn.  Winter had lingered unusually long
that year, and the prairie gleamed dimly white, with the sledge trail
cutting athwart it, a smear of blue-grey, in the foreground.  It
was--for Lander's lay behind them with the snow among the stubble belts
that engirdled it--an empty wilderness the mettlesome team swung
across, and during the first few minutes the cold struck through them
with a sting like the thrust of steel.  A half-moon hung low above it,
coppery red with frost, and there was no sound but the crunch beneath
the runners, and the beat of hoofs that rang dully through the silence
like a roll of muffled drums.

Sleighs like the one that Hawtrey drove are not common on the prairie,
where the farmer generally uses the humble bob-sled when the snow lies
unusually long.  The one in question had, however, been made for use in
Montreal, and bought back East by a friend of Hawtrey's, who was, as it
happened, possessed of some means, which is a somewhat unusual thing in
the case of a Western wheat-grower.  He had also bought the team--the
fastest he could obtain--and when the warmth came back to them Hawtrey
and the girl became conscious of the exhilaration of the swift and easy
motion.  The sleigh was light and narrow, and Hawtrey, who drew the
thick driving robe higher about his companion, did not immediately draw
the mittened hand he had used back again.  The girl did not resent the
fact that it still rested behind her shoulder, nor did Hawtrey attach
any particular significance to the matter.  He was a man who usually
acted on impulse, with singularly easy manners.  How far Sally
understood him did not appear, but she came of folk who had waged a
very stubborn battle with the wilderness, and there was a vein of
somewhat grim tenacity in her.

She was, however, conscious that there was something beneath her feet
which forced her, if she was to sit comfortably, rather close against
her companion; and it seemed expedient to point it out.

"Can't you move a little?  I can't get my feet fixed right," she said.

Hawtrey looked down at her with a smile.  "I'm afraid I can't unless I
get right outside.  Aren't you happy there?"

It was the kind of speech he was in the habit of making, but there was
rather more colour in the girl's face than the stinging night air
brought there, and she glanced at the bottom of the sleigh.

"It's a sack of some kind, isn't it?" she said.

"Yes," said Hawtrey; "it's a couple of three-bushel bags.  Some special
seed wheat Lorton sent to Winnipeg for.  Ormond brought them out from
the railroad.  I promised I'd take them along to him."

"You should have told me.  It's most a league round by Lorton's place,"
said Sally.

"That won't take long with this team.  Have you any great objections to
another fifteen minutes' drive with me?"

Sally looked up at him, and the moonlight was on her face, which was a
very comely one.

"No," she admitted, "I haven't any."

She said it demurely, but there was a just perceptible something in her
voice which might have warned the man had he been addicted to taking
warning from anything, which was, however, not the case.  It was, in
fact, his trouble that he seldom thought about what he did until he was
compelled to face the consequences; and it was, perhaps, to his credit
that he had after all done very little harm, for there was hot blood in
him.

"Well," he said, "I'm not going to grumble about those extra three
miles, but you were asking what land I meant to break this spring.
What put that into your mind?"

"Our folks," said Sally candidly.  "They were talking about you."

This again was significant, but Hawtrey did not notice it.

"I've no doubt they said I ought to tackle the new quarter section?" he
suggested.

"Yes," assented Sally.  "Why don't you do it?  Last fall you thrashed
out quite a big harvest."

"I certainly did.  There, however, didn't seem to be many dollars left
over when I'd faced the bills."

The girl made a little gesture of impatience.  "Oh," she said, "Bob and
Jake and Jasper sowed on less backsetting, and they're buying new teams
and ploughs.  Can't you do what they do, though I guess they don't go
off for weeks to Winnipeg?"

The man was silent.  He had an incentive to work hard which she was not
acquainted with, and he had certainly done so, but the long, iron
winter, when there was nothing that could be done, had proved too much
for him.  It was very dreary sitting alone evening after evening beside
the stove, and the company of the somnolent Sproatly was not much more
cheerful.  Now and then his pleasure-loving nature had revolted from
the barrenness of his lot when he drove home from an odd visit to a
neighbour, stiff with cold, through the stinging frost, and, arriving
in the dark, found the stove had burned out and water frozen hard
inside the house.  These were things his neighbours patiently endured,
but Hawtrey had fled for life and brightness to Winnipeg.

Sally glanced up at him with a little nod.  "You take hold with a good
grip.  Everybody allows that," she said.  "The trouble is you let
things go afterwards.  You don't stay with it."

"Yes," assented Hawtrey.  "I believe you have hit it, Sally.  That's
very much what's the matter with me."

"Then," said the girl with quiet insistence, "won't you try?"

A faint flush crept into Hawtrey's face.  The girl was less than
half-taught, and unacquainted with anything beyond the simple,
strenuous life of the prairie.  Her greatest accomplishments consisted
of some skill in bakery and the handling of half-broken teams; but she
had once or twice given him what he recognised as excellent advice.
There was something incongruous in the situation, but, as usual, he
preferred to regard it whimsically.

"I suppose I'll have to, if you insist.  If ever I'm the grasping owner
of the biggest farm in this district I'll blame you," he said.

Sally said nothing further on that subject, and some time later the
sleigh went skimming down among the birches in a shallow ravine.
Hawtrey pulled the horses up when they reached the bottom of it, and
glanced up at a shapeless cluster of buildings that showed black amidst
the trees.

"Lorton won't be back until to-morrow, but I promised to pitch the bags
into his granary," he said.  "If I hump them up the trail here it will
save us driving round through the bluff."

He got down, and though the bags were heavy he managed to hoist the
first of them on to his shoulders, with Sally's assistance, and then
staggered up the steep foot-trail that climbed the slope with it.  He
was more or less accustomed to carrying bags of grain between store and
waggon, but his mittened hands were numbed, and his joints were stiff
with frost just then, and Sally noticed that he floundered rather
wildly.  In another moment or two, however, he vanished into the gloom
among the trees, and she sat listening to the uneven crunch of his
footsteps in the snow, until there was a sudden crash of broken
branches, and a sound as of something falling heavily down a declivity.
Then there was another crash, and stillness again.

Sally gasped, and clenched her mittened hands hard upon the reins as
she remembered that Lorton's bye trail skirted the edge of a very steep
bank, but she lost neither her collectedness nor her nerve.  Presence
of mind in the face of an emergency is probably as much a question of
experience as of temperament, and, as it happened, she had, like other
women in that country, seen men struck down by half-trained horses,
crushed by collapsing strawpiles, and once or twice gashed by a mower
blade.  This was no doubt why she remembered that the impatient team
would probably move on if she left the sleigh, and she drove them to
the first of the birches before she got down.  Then she knotted the
reins about a branch, and called out sharply.

No answer came out of the shadows, and her heart beat unpleasantly fast
as she plunged in among the trees, keeping below the narrow trail that
went slanting up the side of the declivity, until she stopped, with
another gasp, when she reached a spot where a ray of moonlight came
filtering down.  A limp figure in an old skin coat lay almost at her
feet, and she dropped on her knees beside it in the snow.  Hawtrey's
face showed an unpleasant greyish-white in the faint silvery light.

"Gregory!" she cried hoarsely.

The man opened his eyes, and blinked at her in a half-dazed manner.
"Fell down," he said.  "Think I felt my leg go--and my side's stabbing
me.  Go for somebody."

Sally glanced round, and noticed that the grain bag lay burst open not
far away.  She fancied that he had clung to it after he lost his
footing, which explained why he had fallen so heavily, but that was not
a point of any consequence now.  There was nobody who could help her
within two leagues of the spot, and it was evident that she could not
leave him there to freeze.  Then she noticed that the trees grew rather
farther apart just there, and rising swiftly she ran back to bring the
team.  The ascent was steep, and she had to urge them up it with sharp
cries and blows with her mittened hand amidst the shadowy trunks and
through snapping undergrowth before she reached the spot where Hawtrey
lay.  He looked up at her when at last they stood snorting close beside
him.

"You can't turn them here," he said.

Sally was never sure how she managed it, for the sleigh drove against
the slender trunks, and the fiery beasts, terrified by the snapping of
the undergrowth, were almost unmanageable; but at last they were facing
the descent again, and she stooped and twined her arms about the
shoulders of her companion, who now lay almost against the sleigh.

"It's going to hurt, Gregory, but I have got to get you in," she said.

Then she gasped, for Hawtrey was a man of full stature, and it was a
heavy lift.  She could not raise him wholly, and he cried out once when
his injured leg trailed in the snow.  Still, with the most strenuous
effort she had ever made she moved him a yard or so, and then
staggering fell with her side against the sleigh.  She felt faint with
the pain of it, but with another desperate lift she drew him into the
sleigh, and let him sink down gently upon the bag that still lay there.
His eyes had shut again, and he said nothing now.

[Illustration: "She could not raise him wholly, and he cried out once
when his injured leg trailed in the snow."]

It took only another moment or two to wrap the thick driving robe about
him, and after that she glanced down, with one hand still beneath his
neck.  It was clear that he was quite unconscious of her presence, and
stooping swiftly she kissed his grey face.  Then she settled herself in
the driving seat with only a blanket coat to shelter her from the
stinging frost, and the horses went cautiously down the slope.  She did
not urge them until they reached the level, for the trail that wound up
out of the ravine was difficult, but when the wide white expanse once
more stretched away before them she laid the biting whip across their
backs.

That was quite sufficient.  They were fiery beasts, and when they broke
into a furious gallop the rush of night wind that screamed by struck
her tingling cheeks like a lash of wires.  Then all power of feeling
went out of her hands, her arms grew stiff and heavy, and she was glad
that the trail led smooth and straight to the horizon.  Hawtrey, who
had moved a little, lay, a shapeless figure, across her feet, but he
answered nothing when she spoke to him.

The team went far at the gallop, and the beat of hoofs rose up, dulled
a little, in a wild staccato drumming.  There was an insistent
crunching beneath the runners, and a fine mist of snow beat against the
sleigh, but the girl leaning forward, a tense figure, with nerveless
hands clenched upon the reins, saw nothing but the blue-grey riband of
trail that steadily unrolled itself before her.  At length, however, a
blurred mass, which she knew to be a birch bluff, grew out of the white
waste, and presently a cluster of darker smudges shot up into the shape
of a log-house, sod stables, and strawpile granary.  A minute or two
later, she pulled the team up with an effort, and a man, who flung the
door of the house open, came out into the moonlight.  He stopped, and
apparently gazed at her in astonishment.

"Miss Creighton!" he said.

"Don't stand there," said Sally.  "Take the near horse's head, and lead
them right up to the door."

"What's the matter?" the man asked stupidly.

"Lead the team up," said Sally.  "Jump, if you can."

It was supposed on that part of the prairie that Sproatly had never
moved with much expedition in his life, but that night he sprang
towards the horses at a commanding wave of the girl's hand.  He started
when he saw his comrade lying in the bottom of the sleigh, but Sally
disregarded his hurried questions.

"Help me to get him out," she said, when he stopped the team.  "Keep
his right leg as straight as you can.  I don't want to lift him.  We
must slide him in."

They did it somehow, though the girl was breathless before their task,
which the snow made a little easier, was finished, and the perspiration
started from the man.  Then Sally turned to the latter.

"Get into the sleigh, and don't spare the team," she said.  "Drive over
to Watson's, and bring him along.  You can tell him your partner's
broke his leg, and some of his ribs.  Start right now!"

Sproatly did her bidding, and when the door closed behind him she flung
off her blanket coat and thrust fresh billets into the stove.  Then she
looked for some coffee in the store cupboard, and set on a kettle;
after which she sat down on the floor by Hawtrey's side.  He lay still,
with the thick driving robe beneath him, and though the colour was
creeping back into his face, his eyes were shut, and he was apparently
quite insensible of her presence.  For the first time she was conscious
of a distressful faintness, which, as she had come suddenly out of the
stinging frost into the little overheated room, which reeked with
tobacco smoke and a stale smell of cooking, was not astonishing.  She
mastered it, however, and presently, seeing that Hawtrey did not move;
glanced about her with some curiosity, for this was the first time she
had entered his house.

The room was scantily furnished, and, though very few of the bachelor
farmers in that country live luxuriously, she fancied that Sproatly,
who had evidently very rudimentary ideas on the subject of
house-cleaning, had not brought back all the sundries he had thrown out
into the snow.  It then contained a table, a carpenter's bench, and a
couple of chairs, and there were still smears of dust upon the
uncovered floor.  The birch-log walls had been rudely panelled with
match-boarding half-way up, which was a somewhat unusual luxury, but
the half-seasoned boards had rent with the heat, and exuded streaks of
resin to which the grime and dust had clung.  A pail, which apparently
contained potato peelings, stood amidst a litter of old long boots and
broken harness against one wall, and the floor was black and thick with
grease all round the rusty stove.  A pile of unwashed dishes and
cooking utensils stood upon the table, and the lamp above her head had
blackened the boarded ceiling, and diffused a subtle odour of kerosene.

Sally noticed it all with disgust, and then, seeing that Hawtrey had
opened his eyes, she made a cup of coffee and got him to drink it.
After that he smiled at her.

"Thanks," he said feebly.  "Where's Sproatly?  My side stabs me."

Sally raised one hand.  "You're not to say a word.  Sproatly's gone for
Watson, and he'll soon fix you up.  Now lie quite still, and shut your
eyes again."

The man obeyed her, in so far as that he lay still, but his eyes were
not more than half-closed, and she could not resist the temptation to
see what he would do if she went away.  She had half risen, when he
stretched a hand out and felt for her dress, and she sank down again
with a curious softness in her face.  Then he let his eyes close
altogether, as if satisfied, and by and bye she gently laid her hand on
his.

He did not appear to notice it, and, though she did not know whether he
was asleep or unconscious, she sat beside him, with compassion in her
eyes.  There was no sound but the snapping of the birch billets in the
rusty stove.  She was anxious, but not unduly so, for she knew that men
who live as the prairie farmers do, usually recover from such injuries
as had befallen him more or less readily.  It would also not be very
long before assistance arrived, for it was understood that the man she
had sent Sproatly for had almost gone through a medical course in an
Eastern city before he set up as a prairie farmer.  Why he had suddenly
changed his profession was a point he did not explain, and, as he had
always shown himself willing to do what he could when any of his
neighbours met with an accident, nobody troubled him about the matter.

By and bye Sproatly brought him to the homestead, and he was busy with
Hawtrey for some time.  Then they got him to bed, and Watson came back
to the room where Sally was anxiously waiting.

"His idea about his injuries is more or less correct, but we'll have no
great trouble in pulling him round," he said.  "The one point that's
worrying me is the looking after him.  One couldn't expect him to
thrive upon slabs of burnt salt pork, and Sproatly's bread."

"I'll do what I can," said Sproatly indignantly.

"You!" said the other.  "It would be criminal to leave you in charge of
a sick man."

Sally quietly put on her blanket coat.  "If you can stay that long,
I'll be back soon after it's light," she said.  Then she turned to
Sproatly.  "You can wash up those dishes on the table, and get a brush
and sweep this room out.  If it's not quite smart to-morrow you'll do
it again."

[Illustration: "Then she turned to Sproatly.  'You can wash up those
dishes on the table.'"]

Then, while Sproatly grinned, she went out and drove away through the
bitter frost.




CHAPTER III.

WYLLARD ASSENTS.

Sally, who brought her mother with her, spent a couple of weeks at
Hawtrey's homestead before Watson decided that his patient could be
entrusted to Sproatly's care; but she came back afterwards twice a week
or so with odd baskets of dainties to make sure that the latter, in
whom she had no confidence, was discharging his duties satisfactorily.
She had driven over again one afternoon, when Hawtrey, whose bones were
knitting well, lay talking to another man in his little sleeping room.

There was no furniture in it whatever, beyond the wooden bunk he lay
in, and a deerhide lounge chair he had made during the winter; but the
stovepipe from the kitchen led across part of it, and then up again
into the room beneath the roof above.  It had been one of Sproatly's
duties during the past two weeks to rise and renew the fire when the
cold awakened his comrade soon after midnight.  At present he was
outside the house, whipsawing birch-logs and splitting them into
billets, which was an occupation he cherished a profound dislike for.

Spring had, however, come suddenly, as it usually does on the prairie,
a few days earlier, and the snow was melting fast under a brilliant
sun.  The bright rays that streamed in through the window struck
athwart the glimmering dust motes in the little bare room, and fell,
pleasantly warm, upon the man who lay in the deerhide chair.  He was a
year or two older than Hawtrey, though he had scarcely reached thirty,
a man of tranquil manner, with a rather lean and deeply bronzed face,
of average height, and somewhat spare of figure.  He held a pipe in his
hand, and was then looking at Hawtrey with quiet, contemplative eyes.
They were, indeed, his most noticeable feature, though it was difficult
to say whether their colour was grey or hazel-brown, for they were
singularly clear, and there was something which suggested steadfastness
in their unwavering gaze.  He wore long boots, trousers of old blue
duck, and a jacket of soft deerskin such as the Blackfeet dress; and
there was nothing about him to suggest that he was a man of varied
experience, and of some importance in that country.

Harry Wyllard was native-born, and had in his young days assisted his
father in the working of a little Manitoban farm, when that great grain
province was still, for the most part, a wilderness.  Then a more
prosperous relative on the Pacific slope had sent him to Toronto
University, where after a session or two he had become involved in a
difference of opinion with the authorities.  Though the matter was
never made quite clear, it was generally believed that Wyllard had
quietly borne the blame of a comrade's action, for there was a vein of
eccentric generosity in the lad.  In any case, he left Toronto, and the
relative, who was largely interested in the fur business, next sent him
north to the Behring Sea, in one of his schooners.  The business was
then a remarkably hazardous one, for the skin buyers and pelagic
sealers had trouble all round with the Alaskan representatives of
American trading companies, whose preserves they poached upon, as well
as with the commanders of the gunboats sent up there to protect the
seals.

Men's lives were staked against the value of a fur, edicts were lightly
contravened, and now and then a schooner barely escaped into the
smothering fog with skins looted close aboard forbidden beaches.  It
was a perilous life, and a strenuous one, for they had every white
man's hand against them, as well as fog and gale, and the reefs that
lay in the tideways of almost uncharted waters; but Wyllard made the
most of it.  He kept the peace with jealous skippers who resented the
presence of a man they might command as mate, but whose views they were
forced to listen to when he spoke as supercargo; won the good-will of
sea-bred Indians, and drove a good trade with them; and not
infrequently brought his boat back first to the plunging schooner
loaded with reeking skins.

Then he fell into trouble again when they were hanging off the Eastern
Isles under double reefs, watching for the Russians' seals.  A boat's
crew from another schooner had been cast ashore, and, as they were in
peril of falling into the Russians' hands, Wyllard led a reckless boat
expedition to bring them off again.  He succeeded, in so far that the
wrecked men were taken off the roaring beach through a tumult of
breaking surf, but as they pulled seaward the fog shut down on them,
and one boat, manned by three men, never reached the schooners.  They
blew horns all night, standing off and on, and crept along the smoking
beach next day, though the surf made landing impossible.  Then a sudden
gale drove them off the shore, and, as it was evident that their
comrades must have perished, they reluctantly sailed for other fishing
grounds.  As one result of this, Wyllard broke with his prosperous
relative when he came back to Vancouver.

After that he helped to strengthen railroad bridges among the mountains
of British Columbia, worked in logging camps, and shovelled in the
mines, and, as it happened, met Hawtrey, who, tempted by high wages,
had spent a winter in the Mountain Province after a disastrous harvest.
In the meanwhile, his father had sold out, and taken up virgin soil in
Assiniboia.  He died soon after Wyllard went back to him, and a few
months later the relative in Vancouver also died.  Somewhat to
Wyllard's astonishment, he bequeathed him a considerable property,
which the latter realised and sunk most of the proceeds in further
acres of virgin prairie.  Willow Range was already one of the largest
farms between Winnipeg and the Rockies.

"The leg's getting along satisfactorily?" he said at length.

Hawtrey, who appeared unusually thoughtful, admitted that it was.

"Any way, it's singularly unfortunate that I'm broken up just now," he
added.  "There's the ploughing to commence in a week or two, and,
besides that, I was thinking of getting married."

Wyllard was somewhat astonished at this announcement.  For one thing,
he was more or less acquainted with the state of his friend's finances.
During the next moment or two he glanced meditatively through the open
door into the adjoining room, where Sally Creighton was busy beside the
stove.  The sleeves of her light bodice were rolled up well above the
elbow, and she had pretty, round arms, which were just then partly
immersed in dough.

"I don't think there's a nicer or more capable girl in this part of
Assiniboia," he said.

"Oh, yes," said Hawtrey.  "Anybody would admit that.  Still, since you
seem so sure of it, why don't you marry her yourself?"

Wyllard looked at his comrade rather curiously.  "Well," he said,
"there are one or two reasons that don't affect Miss Sally and only
concern myself.  Besides, it's highly improbable that she'd have me."

He paused to light his pipe, which had gone out, before he looked up
again.  "Since it evidently isn't Sally, have I met the lady?"

"You haven't.  She's in England."

"It's four years, isn't it, since you were over there?"

Hawtrey lay silent a minute, and then made a little confidential
gesture.  "I'd better tell you all about the thing," he said.  "Our
folks were people of some little standing in the county.  In fact, as
they were far from rich, they had just standing enough to embarrass
them.  In most respects they were ultra-conventional with old-fashioned
ideas, and, though there was no open break, I'm afraid I didn't get on
with them quite as well as I should have done, which is why I came out
to Canada.  They started me on the land decently, and twice when we'd
harvest frost and horse-sickness, they sent the draft I asked them for
along.  That is one reason why I'm not going to worry them, though I'd
very much like another now.  You see, there are two girls, as well as
Reggie, who's reading for the Bar."

"I don't think you have mentioned the lady yet."

"She's a connection of some friends of ours.  Her mother, so far as I
understand it, married beneath her--a man her folks didn't like.  He
died, and, when by and bye his wife died, Agatha, who was brought up by
his relations, was often at the Grange.  It's a little, old-fashioned,
half-ruinous place, a mile or two from where we live in the North of
England.  It belongs to her mother's folks, but I think there was still
a feud between them and her father's people, who brought her up to earn
her living.  We saw a good deal of each other, and fell in love as boy
and girl.  Well, when I went back, one winter, after I'd been here two
years, Agatha was at the Grange again, and we decided then that I was
to bring her out as soon as I had a home she could live in to offer
her."

He broke off for a moment, and there was a trace of embarrassment in
his manner when he went on again.  "Perhaps I ought to have managed it
sooner," he added.  "Still, things never seem to go quite as one would
like with me, and you can understand that a dainty, delicate girl
brought up in comfort in England would find it rough out here."

Wyllard glanced round the bare room in which he sat, and into the
other, which was also furnished in a remarkably primitive manner.

"Yes," he assented, "I can quite realise that."

"Well," said his companion, "it's a thing that has been worrying me a
good deal of late, because, as a matter of fact, I'm not much farther
forward than I was four years ago.  In the meanwhile, Agatha, who has
some talent for music, was in a first-class master's hands.  Afterwards
she gave lessons, and got odd singing engagements.  A week ago, I had a
letter from her in which she said that her throat was giving out."

He stopped again for a moment, with trouble in his face, and then
fumbling under his pillow produced a letter, which he carefully folded.

"We're rather good friends," he said.  "You can read that part of it."

Wyllard took the letter, and a suggestion of quickening interest crept
into his eyes as he read.  Then he looked up at Hawtrey.

"It's a brave letter--the kind a brave girl would write," he said.
"Still, it's evident that she's anxious."

There was silence for a moment or two, which was only broken by Sally
clattering about the stove.  Dissimilar in character, as they were, the
two were firm friends, and there had been a day when, as they worked
upon a dizzy railroad trestle, Hawtrey had held his comrade fast when a
plank slipped away.  He had, it was characteristic, thought nothing of
the matter, but Wyllard was one who remembered things of that kind.

"Now," said Hawtrey, "you see my trouble.  This place isn't fit for
her, and I couldn't even go across for some time yet, but her father's
folks have died off, and there's nothing to be expected from her
mother's relatives.  Any way, she can't be left to face the blow alone.
It's unthinkable.  Well, there's only one course open to me, and that's
to raise as many dollars on a mortgage as I can, fit the place out with
fixings brought from Winnipeg, and sow a double acreage with borrowed
capital.  I'll send for her as soon as I can get the house made a
little more comfortable."

Wyllard sat silent a moment or two, and then leaned forward in his
chair.

"No," he said, "there are two other and wiser courses.  Tell the girl
what things are like here, and just how you stand.  She'd face it
bravely.  There's no doubt of that."

Hawtrey looked at him sharply.  "I believe she would, but considering
that you have never seen her, I don't quite know why you should be sure
of it."

Wyllard smiled.  "The girl who wrote that letter wouldn't flinch."

"Well," said Hawtrey, "you can mention the second course."

"I'll let you have $1,000 at bank interest--which is less than any
land-broker would charge you--without a mortgage."

Again Hawtrey showed a certain embarrassment.  "No," he said, "I'm
afraid it can't be done.  I'd a kind of claim upon my people, though it
must be admitted that I've worked it off, but I can't quite bring
myself to borrow money from my friends."

Wyllard, who saw that he meant it, made a gesture of resignation.
"Then you must let the girl make the most of it, but keep out of the
hands of the mortgage man.  By the way, I haven't told you that I've
decided to make a trip to the Old Country.  We'd a bonanza crop last
season, and Martial could run the range for a month or two.  After all,
my father was born yonder, and I can't help feeling now and then that I
should have made an effort to trace up that young Englishman's
relatives, and tell them what became of him."

"The one you struck in British Columbia?  You have mentioned him, but,
so far as I remember, you never gave me any particulars about the
thing."

Wyllard seemed to hesitate, which was not a habit of his.  "There is,"
he said, "not much to tell.  I struck the lad sitting down, played out,
upon a trail that led over a big divide.  It was clear that he couldn't
get any further, and there wasn't a settlement within a good many
leagues of the spot.  We were up in the ranges prospecting then.  Well,
we made camp and gave him supper--he couldn't eat very much--and he
told me what brought him there afterwards.  It seemed to me he'd always
been weedy in the chest, but he'd been working waist-deep in an icy
creek, building a dam at a mine, until his lungs had given out.  The
mining boss was a hard case and had no mercy on him, but the lad, who
seemed to have had a rough time in the Mountain Province, stayed with
it until he played out altogether."

Wyllard's face hardened a little as he mentioned the mining boss, and a
rather curious little sparkle crept into his eyes, but after a pause he
proceeded quietly:

"We did what we could for him.  In fact, it rather broke up the
prospecting trip, but he was too far through," he added.  "He hung on
for a week or two, and one of us brought a doctor out from the
settlements, but the day before we broke camp Jake and I buried him."

Hawtrey made a sign of comprehension.  He was reasonably well
acquainted with his comrade's character, and fancied he knew who had
brought the doctor out.  He also knew that Wyllard had been earning his
living as a railroad navvy or chopper then, and, in view of the cost of
provisions brought by pack-horse into the remoter bush, the reason why
he had abandoned his prospecting trip after spending a week or two
taking care of the sick lad was clear enough.

"You never learned his name?" he asked.

"I didn't," said Wyllard.  "I went back to the mine, but several things
suggested that the name upon their pay-roll wasn't his real one.  He
commenced a broken message the night he died, but the hemorrhage cut
him off in the middle of it.  The wish that I should tell his people
somehow was in his eyes."

He broke off for a moment with a deprecatory gesture, which in
connection with the story was very expressive.

"I have never done it, but how could I?  All I know is that he was a
delicately brought up young Englishman, and the only clue I have is a
watch with a London maker's name on it and a girl's photograph.  I've a
very curious notion that I shall meet that girl some day."

Hawtrey, who made no comment, lay still for a minute or two after this,
but his face suggested that he was considering something.

"Harry," he said presently, "I shall not be fit for a journey for quite
a while yet, and if I went over to England I couldn't get the ploughing
done and the crop in; which, if I'm going to be married, is absolutely
necessary."

There was no doubt about the latter point, for the small Western farmer
has very seldom a balance in hand, and, for that matter, is not
infrequently in debt to the nearest storekeeper.  He must, as a rule,
secure a harvest or abandon his holding, since, as soon as the crop is
thrashed, the bills pour in.  Wyllard made a sign of assent.

"Well," said Hawtrey, "if you're going to England you could go as my
deputy.  You could make Agatha understand what things are like here,
and bring her out to me.  I'll arrange for the wedding to be soon as
she arrives."

His comrade was not a conventional person, but he pointed out several
objections.  Hawtrey over-ruled them, however, and eventually Wyllard
reluctantly assented.

"As it happens, Mrs. Hastings is going over, too, and if she comes back
about the same time the thing might be managed," he said.  "I believe
she's in Winnipeg just now, but I'll write her.  By the way, have you a
photograph of Agatha?"

"I haven't," said Hawtrey.  "She gave me one, but somehow it got
mislaid one house-cleaning.  That's rather an admission, isn't it?"

It certainly occurred to Wyllard that it was.  In fact, it struck him
as a very curious thing that Hawtrey should have lost the picture which
the girl he was in love with had given him.  He sat silent for a moment
or two, and then stood up.

"When I hear from Mrs. Hastings I'll drive round again.  Candidly, the
thing has somewhat astonished me.  I always had a fancy it would be
Sally."

Hawtrey laughed.  "Sally?" he said.  "We're first-rate friends, but I
never had the faintest notion of marrying her."

Wyllard went out to harness his team, and, as it happened, did not
notice that Sally, who had approached the door with a tray in her hands
a moment or two earlier, drew back before him softly.  When he had
crossed the room she set down the tray and leaned upon the table, with
her cheeks burning.  Then, feeling that she could not stay in the
stove-heated room, she went out, and stood in the slushy snow.  One of
her hands was tightly closed, and all the colour had vanished from her
cheeks now.  She, however, contrived to give Hawtrey his supper by and
bye, and soon afterwards drove away.




CHAPTER IV.

A CRISIS.

While Wyllard made arrangements for his journey, and Sally Creighton
went very quietly about her work on the lonely prairie farm, it
happened one evening that Miss Winifred Rawlinson sat uneasily
expectant far back under the gallery of a concert hall in an English
manufacturing town.  She could not hear very well there, but it was the
cheapest place she could obtain, and economy was of some importance to
her.  Besides, by craning her neck a little to avoid the hat of the
rather strikingly dressed young woman in front of her, she could, at
least, see the stage.  The programme which she held in one hand
announced that Miss Agatha Ismay would sing a certain aria from a great
composer's oratorio, and she leaned further forward in her chair when a
girl of about her own age, which was twenty-four, slowly advanced to
the centre of the stage.

She was a tall, well-made, brown-haired girl, with a quiet grace of
movement and a comely face, attired in a long trailing dress of a
shimmering corn-straw tint, but when she stood looking at the audience
Miss Rawlinson noticed a hint of tension in her expression.  Agatha
Ismay had sung at unimportant concerts with marked success, but that
evening there was something very like shrinking in her eyes.

Then a crash of chords from the piano melted into a rippling prelude,
and Winifred breathed easier when her friend began to sing.  Her voice
was sweet and excellently trained, and there was a deep stillness of
appreciation when the clear notes thrilled through the close-packed
hall.  No one could doubt that the first part of the aria was a
success, for half-subdued applause broke out when the voice sank into
silence, and for a few moments the piano rippled on alone; but it
seemed to Winifred that the look of tension was still in the singer's
face, and once more she grew uneasy, for she understood the cause for
it.

"The last bit of the second part's rather trying," said a young man
behind her.  "There's an awkward jump of two full tones that was too
much for our soprano when we tried it at the choral union.  Miss
Ismay's very true in intonation, but I don't suppose most of the rest
would notice it if she shirked a little and left that high sharp out."

Winifred had little knowledge of music, but she was sufficiently
acquainted with her friend's character to be certain that Agatha would
not attempt to leave the sharp in question out.  This was one reason
why she sat rigidly still when the clear voice rang out again.  It rose
from note to note, full and even, but she could see the singer's face,
and there was no doubt whatever that she was making a strenuous effort.
Nobody else, however, seemed to notice it, for Winifred flung a swift
glance round, and then fixed her eyes upon the dominant figure in the
corn-straw dress that the glare of light fell shimmering on.  The sweet
voice was still rising, and she longed that the accompanist would force
the tone to cover it a little, and put the loud pedal on.  He, however,
was gazing at his music, and played on quietly until, with startling
suddenness, the climax came.

The voice sank a full tone, jarring horribly on the theme, rose, and
hoarsely trailed off into silence again.  Then the accompanist glanced
over his shoulder, and struck a ringing chord while he waited for a
sign, and there was a curious stirring among the audience.  The girl in
the shimmering dress stood quite still for a moment with a spot of
crimson in her cheek and a half-dazed look in her eyes, and then,
turning swiftly, moved off the stage.

Then Winifred rose with a gasp, and turned upon the young man next her,
who looked up inquiringly.

"Yes," she said sharply; "can't you let me pass?  I'm going out."

It was about half-past nine when she reached the wet and miry street.
A fine rain drove into her face, and she had rather more than a mile to
walk without an escort, but that was a matter which caused her no
concern.  She was a self-reliant young woman, and accustomed to going
about unattended, while she was also quite aware that the scene she had
just witnessed would bring about a crisis in her and her friend's
affairs.  For all that, she was unpleasantly conscious of the leak in
one rather shabby boot when she stepped down from the sidewalk to cross
the street, and when she opened her umbrella beneath a gas lamp she
pursed up her mouth.  There were a couple of holes in it near where the
ribs ran into the ferrule, which she had not noticed before.  She,
however, plodded on resolutely through the drizzle, until three
striplings who came with linked arms down the pavement of a quieter
street barred her way.  One wore his hat on one side, the one nearest
the kerb flourished a little cane, and the third of them smiled at her
fatuously.

"Oh my!" he said.  "Where's dear Jemima off in such a hurry?"

Winifred drew herself up.  She was little and determined, and, it must
be admitted, not quite unaccustomed to that kind of thing.

"Will you let me pass?" she said.  "There's a policeman at the next
turning."

"There really is," said one of them.  "The Dook has another engagement.
Dream of me, Olivia!"

A beat of heavy feet drew nearer, and the three roysterers disappeared
in the direction of a flaming music-hall, where the second "house" was
probably commencing, while Winifred, who had stepped into the gutter to
avoid the one with the cane, turned as a stalwart, blue-coated figure
moved towards her.

"Thank you, officer," she said; "they've gone."

The man merely raised a hand as if in comprehension, and plodded back
to his post.  Perhaps he felt sorry for young women who have to earn
their living, for he had, at least, appeared promptly when he was
needed; and perhaps he attached no great importance to the matter.
There is a good deal that the policeman knows and accepts with
undisturbed equanimity, which if plainly expressed would, no doubt,
form a somewhat grim commentary on our complex civilisation.

In the meanwhile Winifred went on until she let herself into a house in
a quiet street, and ascending to the second floor entered a simply
furnished room.  It, however, contained a piano; and a little table on
which a typewriter stood amidst a litter of papers occupied the
opposite side of it.  The girl sloughed off her waterproof, and rather
flung than hung it on a peg behind the door, after which she sat down
in a low chair beside the little fire.  She was not a handsome girl,
and it was evident that she did not trouble herself greatly about her
attire.  Her face was too thin, her figure too slight and spare, but
there was usually, even when she was anxious, as she certainly was that
night, a shrewdly whimsical twinkle in her eyes, and though her lips
were set her expression was compassionate.

She was, however, not the person to sit still very long, and in a
minute or two she rose and placed a little kettle on the fire, after
which she took a few scones, a coffee-pot, and a tin of condensed milk
from a cupboard.  When she had spread them out upon a table she
discovered that there was some of the condensed milk upon her fingers,
and it must be admitted that she sucked them.  They were little, stubby
fingers, which somehow looked capable.

"It must have been four o'clock when I had that bun and a cup of tea,"
she said.

She glanced at the table longingly: for she occasionally found it
necessary to place a certain check upon a healthy appetite.  She was,
however, not singular in this respect, since the practice of such
self-denial is, unfortunately, not a very unusual thing in the case of
a good many young women in our cities who work remarkably hard.  Then
she resolutely shook her head.

"I must wait for Agatha," she said, and crossing the room towards the
typewriter table stopped to glance at a little framed photograph that
stood upon the mantel.  It was a portrait of Gregory Hawtrey taken some
years ago, and she apostrophied it with quiet scorn.

"Now you're wanted you're naturally away out yonder," she said.
"You're like the rest of them--despicable!"

This seemed to relieve her feelings, and she sat down before the
machine, which clicked and rattled for several minutes under her stubby
fingers.  Then the clicking ceased with sudden abruptness, and she
prodded the mechanism viciously with a hairpin.  As this appeared
unavailing she used her forefinger, and when at length the carriage
slid along the rod with a clash there was a smear of grimy oil upon her
cheek and her somewhat tilted nose.  The machine, however, gave no
further trouble, and she endeavoured to make up some, at least, of the
time she had spent at the concert.  It was necessary that it should be
made up, but she was also conscious that she was putting off an evil
moment.

At length the door opened, and Agatha Ismay, wrapped in a long cloak,
came in.  She permitted Winifred to take it from her, and then sank
down into a chair.  There was a strained look in her eyes, and her face
was very weary.

[Illustration: "At length the door opened, and Agatha Ismay, wrapped in
a long cloak, came in."]

"You're working late again?" she said.

Winifred nodded.  "It's the men who loaf, my dear," she said.  "When
you undertake the transcription of an author's scrawl at ninepence the
thousand words you have to work unusually hard, especially when, as it
is in this case, the thing's practically unreadable.  Besides, the
woman in it makes me lose my temper.  If I'd had a man of the kind
described to deal with I'd have thrashed him."

She was throwing words about, partly to conceal her anxiety, and partly
with the charitable purpose of giving her companion time to approach
the subject that must be mentioned as she thought best; but she rather
over-did it, and Agatha looked at her sharply.

"Winny," she said, "you know.  You've been there."

Winifred turned towards her quietly, for she could face a crisis.

"Yes," she said, "I have, but you're not going to talk about it until
you have had supper.  Don't move until I make the coffee."

She was genuinely hungry, but while she satisfied her own appetite she
took care that her companion, who did not seem inclined to eat, made a
simple meal.  Then she bundled the plates into a cupboard, and sat down
facing her.

"Well," she said, "you have broken down exactly as that throat
specialist said you would.  The first question is, How long it will be
before you can go on again?"

Agatha laughed, a little harsh laugh.  "I didn't tell you everything at
the time: I've broken down for good."

There was a moment or two's tense silence after that, and then Agatha
made a dejected gesture.  "He warned me that this might happen if I
went on singing, but what could I do?  I couldn't cancel my engagements
without telling people why.  He said I must go to Norway and give my
throat and chest a rest."

They looked at one another, and there was in their eyes the
half-bitter, half-weary smile of those to whom the cure prescribed is
ludicrously impossible.  It was Winifred who spoke first.

"Then," she said, "we have to face the situation, and it's not an
encouraging one.  Our joint earnings just keep us here in decency--we
won't say comfort--and they're evidently to be subject to a big
reduction.  It strikes me as a rather curious coincidence that a letter
from that man in Canada and one from your prosperous friends in the
country arrived just before you went out."

She saw the look in Agatha's eyes, and spread her hands out.

"Yes," she admitted; "I hid them.  It seemed to me that you had quite
enough upon your mind this evening.  I don't know if they're likely to
throw any fresh light upon the question what we're going to do."

She produced the letters from a drawer in her table, and Agatha
straightened herself suddenly in her chair when she had opened the
first of them.

"Oh," she cried, "he wants me to go out to him!"

Winifred's face set hard for a moment, but it relaxed again, and she
contrived to hide her dismay.

"Then," she suggested with a trace of dryness, "I suppose you'll
certainly go.  After all, he's probably not worse to live with than
most of them."

Miss Rawlinson was occasionally a little bitter, but she had, like
others of her kind, been compelled to compete in an overcrowded market
with hard-driven men.  She was, however, sincerely attached to her
friend, and she smiled when she saw the flash in Agatha's eyes.

"Oh," she added, "you needn't try to wither me with your indignation.
No doubt he's precisely what he ought to be, and I dare say it will
ease your feelings if you talk about him again; at least, it will help
you to formulate your reasons for going out to him.  I'll listen
patiently, and try not to be uncharitable."

Agatha fell in with the suggestion.  It was a relief to talk, and she
had also a certain respect, which she would not always admit, for her
companion's shrewdness.  She meant to go, but she desired to ascertain
how a less interested person would regard the course she had decided on.

"I have known Gregory since I was a girl," she said.

Winifred pursed her lips up.  "I understood you met him at the Grange,
and you were only there for a few weeks once a year.  After all, that
isn't a very great deal.  It seems he fell in love with you, which is,
perhaps, comprehensible.  What I don't quite know the reason for is why
you fell in love with him."

"Ah," said Agatha, "you have never seen Gregory."

"I haven't," said Winifred sourly; "I have, however, seen his picture,
and one must admit that he's reasonably good-looking.  In fact, I've
seen quite an assortment of them, but it's, perhaps, significant that
the last was taken some years ago."

Agatha smiled.  "Can a photograph show the clean, sanguine temperament
of a man, his impulsive generosity, and cheerful optimism?"

Miss Rawlinson rose, and critically surveyed the photograph on the
mantel.  "I don't want to be discouraging, but after studying that one
I'm compelled to admit that it can't.  No doubt it's the artist's
fault, but I'm willing to admit that a young girl would be rather apt
to credit a man with a face like that with qualities he didn't
possess."  Then she sat down again with a thoughtful expression.  "The
fact is, you set him up on a pedestal and burned incense to him when
you were not old enough to know any better, and when he came home for a
few weeks four years ago you promised to marry him.  Now it seems he's
ready at last, and wants you to go out.  Perhaps it doesn't affect the
question, but if I'd promised to marry a man in Canada he'd certainly
have to come for me.  Isn't there a certain risk in the thing?"

"A risk?"

Winifred nodded.  "Yes," she said, "rather a serious one.  Four years
is a long time, and the man may have changed.  In a new country where
everything's different it must be a thing they're rather apt to do."

A faint, half-compassionate, half-tolerant smile crept into Agatha's
eyes.  The mere idea that the sunny-tempered, brilliant young man whom
she had given her heart to could have changed or degenerated in any way
seemed absurd to her.  Winifred, however, went on again.

"There's another point," she said.  "If he's still the same, which
isn't likely, there has certainly been a change in you.  You have
learned to see things more clearly, and acquired a different standard
from the one you had then.  One can't help growing, and as one grows
one looks for more.  One is no longer pleased with the same things;
it's inevitable."

She broke off for a moment, and her voice grew gentler.

"Well," she added, "I've done my duty in trying to point this out to
you, and now there's only another thing to say: since you're clearly
bent on going, I'm going out with you."

Agatha looked astonished, but there was a suggestion of relief in her
expression, for the two had been firm friends and had faced a good deal
together.

"Oh," she said, "that gets over the one difficulty."

Winifred made a little whimsical gesture.  "I'm not quite sure that it
does.  The difficulty will probably begin when I arrive in Canada, but
I'm a rather capable person, and I believe they don't pay one ninepence
a thousand words in Winnipeg.  Besides, I could keep the books at a
store or hotel, and at the very worst Gregory could, perhaps, find a
husband for me.  Women, one understands, are after all held in some
estimation in that country.  Perhaps there's a man out there who would
treat even a little, plain, vixenish-tempered person with a turned-up
nose decently."

Crossing the room again she banged the cover down on the typewriter,
and then turned to Agatha with a wide gesture and a suggestion of
haziness in her eyes.

"Anyway, I'm very tired of this one.  It would all be intolerable when
you went away."

Agatha stretched out a hand and drew her down beside her.  She, at
least, no longer feared adverse fortune and loneliness, and she was
filled with a gentle compassion, for she knew how hard a fight this
girl had made, and part at least of what she had borne.

"My dear," she said, "we will go together."

Then she opened the second letter, which she had forgotten in the
meanwhile.

"They want me to stay at the Grange for a few weeks," she said, and
smiled.  "An hour ago I felt crushed and beaten--and now, though my
voice has probably gone for good, I don't seem to mind.  Isn't it
almost bewilderingly curious that both these letters should have come
to sweep my troubles away to-night?"

"No," said her companion; "it's distinctly natural--just what one would
have expected.  You wrote the man in Canada soon after you'd seen the
specialist, and his answer was bound to arrive in the next few days."

"But I certainly didn't write the folks at the Grange."

Winifred's eyes twinkled.  "As it happens, I did, two days ago.  I
ventured to point out their duty to them, and they were rather nice
about it in another letter."

Agatha stretched herself out in the low chair with a little sigh of
content.  "Well," she said, "it probably wouldn't have the least effect
if I scolded you.  I believe I'm horribly worn out, Winny, and it will
be a relief unspeakable to get away.  If I can arrange to give up those
pupils I'll go to-morrow."

Winifred made no answer, and kneeling with one elbow resting on the arm
of her companion's chair gazed straight in front of her.  They were
both of them very weary of the long grim struggle, and now a change was
close at hand.




CHAPTER V.

THE OLD COUNTRY.

It was a still, clear evening of spring when Wyllard, unstrapping the
ruchsack from his shoulders, sat down beside a frothing stream in a
dale of Northern England.  On arriving in London a week or two earlier
he had found a letter from Mrs. Hastings, who was then in Paris,
awaiting him, in which she stated that she could not at the moment say
when she would go home again, but that she expected to advise him
shortly.  After answering it he started North, and, obtaining Agatha's
address from Miss Rawlinson, went on again to a certain little town
which stands encircled by towering fells beside a lake in the North
Country.

He had, however, already recognised that his mission was rather a
delicate one, and he decided that it would be advisable to wait until
he heard from Mrs. Hastings before calling upon Miss Ismay.  There then
remained the question, what to do with the next few days.  A
conversation with some pedestrian tourists whom he met at his hotel,
and a glance at a map of the hill-tracks decided him, and remembering
that he had on several occasions kept the trail in Canada for close on
forty miles on end, he bought a Swiss pattern ruchsack, and set out on
foot through the fells.

Incidentally, he saw such scenery as gave him a new conception of the
Old Country, and nearly broke the hearts of his new friends the
tourists, who volunteered to show him the way over what they evidently
considered to be a rather difficult pass.  To their great astonishment
the brown-faced stranger, who wore ordinary tight-fitting American
attire and rather pointed American shoes, went up it apparently without
an effort, and for the credit of the clubs they belonged to, it seemed
incumbent on them to keep pace with him.  They naturally did not know
that he had carried bags of flour and mining tools over very much
higher passes close up to the limit of eternal snow, but after two
days' climbing they were, on the whole, relieved to part company with
him.

A professional guide who overtook them, however, recognised the
capabilities of the man when he noticed the way he lifted his feet and
how he set them down.  This, he decided, was one accustomed to walking
among the heather, but he was wrong; for it was the trick the bushman
learns when he plods through leagues of undergrowth and fallen
branches, or the tall grass of the swamps; and it is a memorable
experience to make a day's journey with such a man.  For the first hour
the thing seems easy, for the pace is never forced, but it also never
slackens down; and as the hours go by the novice, who flounders and
stumbles, grows horribly weary of trying to keep up with that steady,
persistent swing.

Wyllard had travelled since morning along a ridge of fells when he sat
down beside the water and contentedly filled his pipe.  On the one
hand, a wall of crags high above was growing black against the evening
light, and the stream came boiling down clear as crystal among great
boulder stones; but he had wandered through many a grander and more
savage scene of rocky desolation, and it impressed him less than the
green valley in front of him.  He had, at least, never seen anything
like that either on the Pacific slope or in Western Canada.

Early as it was in the season, the meadows between rock and water were
green as emerald, and the hedge-rows, just flushed with verdure, were
clipped and trimmed as though their owner loved them.  There was not a
dead tree in the larch copse which dipped to the stream, and all its
feathery tassels were sprinkled with tiny flecks of crimson and
wondrous green.  Great oaks dotted the meadows, each one perfect in
symmetry.  It seemed that the men who held this land cared for single
trees.  The sleek, tame cattle that rubbed their necks on the level
hedge-top and gazed at him ruminatively were very different from the
wild, long-horned creatures whose furious stampede he had now and then
headed off, riding hard while the roar of hoofs rang through the
dust-cloud that floated like a sea fog across the sun-scorched prairie.
Here, it seemed, all went smoothly; the whole vale was steeped in peace
and tranquillity.

Then he noticed the pale primroses that pushed their yellow flowers up
among the withered leaves, and the faint blue sheen beneath the beech
trunks not far away.  There was a vein of artistic daintiness in this
man, and the elusive beauty of these things curiously appealed to him.
He had seen the riotous, sensuous blaze of flowers kissed by Pacific
breezes, and the burnished gold of wheat that rolled in mile-long
waves; but it seemed to him that the wild things of the English North
were, after all, more wonderful.  They matched its deep peacefulness;
their beauty was chaste, fairy-like, and ethereal.

By and bye a wood pigeon cooed softly somewhere in the shadows, and a
brown thrush perched on a bare oak bough began to sing.  The broken,
repeated melody went curiously well with the rippling murmur of sliding
water, and Wyllard leaned back with a smile to listen, though he could
not remember ever having done anything of that kind before.  His life
had been a strenuous one, spent for the most part in the driving-seat
of great ploughs that rent their ample furrows through virgin prairie,
guiding the clinking binders through the wheat under a blazing sun, or
driving the plunging dories through the clammy fog over short, slopping
seas.  Now, however, the tranquillity of the English valley stole in on
him, and he began to understand how the love of that well-trimmed land
clung to the men out West, who spoke of it tenderly as the Old Country.

Then, for he was in an unusually susceptible mood, he took a little
deerhide case, artistically made by a Blackfoot Indian, from his
pocket, and extracted from it the somewhat faded photograph of an
English girl.  He had got it from the lad he had buried among the
ranges of the Pacific slope, and it had been his companion in many a
desolate camp and on many a weary journey.  The face was delicately
modelled, and there was a freshness in it which is, perhaps, seldom
seen outside the Old Country; but what pleased him more was the
serenity in the clear, innocent eyes.

He was not in love with the picture--he would probably have smiled at
the notion--but he had a curious feeling that he would meet the girl
some day, and that it would then be a privilege only to speak to her.
This was, after all, not so extravagant a fancy as it might appear, for
romance, the mother of chivalry and many graces, still finds shelter in
the hearts of such men as him from the wide spaces of the newer lands.
Shrewd as they are, and practical, they see visions now and then, and,
what is more, prove them to be realities with bleeding hands and toil
incredible.

By and bye he put the photograph back in his pocket, and filled his
pipe again, while it was almost dark before he had smoked it out.  The
thrush had gone, and only the ripple of the water broke the silence,
until he heard footsteps on the stones behind him.  Then, looking
round, he saw a young woman moving towards the river, and he watched
her with a quiet interest, for his perceptions were a little sharper
than usual then, and it seemed to him that she was very much in harmony
with what he thought of as the key-tone of the place.  She was tall and
shapely, and she moved with a quiet grace.  When she stopped a moment,
poised upon a shelf of rock as though considering the easiest way to
the water, her figure fell into reposeful lines, but that was after all
only what he had expected, for he now remembered that he had
half-consciously studied the Englishwomen he had met in the West.

The Western women usually moved, and certainly spoke, with an almost
superfluous vivacity and alertness.  There was in them a feverish
activity, which contrasted with the English deliberation.  The latter
had sometimes exasperated him, but it was becoming comprehensible, and
taking on a more favourable aspect now.  It was, he felt, born of the
tranquillity of this well-trimmed land, a steadfastness that progressed
slowly by system and rule, and he recognised that it would have
troubled his sense of fitness if this girl had clattered down across
the stones hurriedly and noisily.

As yet he could not see her face, but when she went on a little further
it became evident that she desired to cross the river, and was
regarding the row of stepping stones that stretched across it somewhat
dubiously.  One or two had apparently fallen over, or been washed away
by a flood, for there were several rather wide gaps between them,
through which the stream frothed whitely.  As soon as Wyllard noticed
that, he rose and moved towards her.

"You want to get across?" he said.

She was still glancing at the water, but although he did not think she
had seen him or heard his approach, she turned towards him quietly.
Then a momentary sense of astonishment held him almost embarrassed, for
it was her picture he had gazed at scarcely half an hour ago, and he
would have recognised her anywhere.

"Yes," she said.  "It is rather a long way round by the bridge, but
some of the stones seem to have disappeared since I last came this way."

She spoke, as Wyllard had expected, softly and quietly, but he was
first of all a man of action, and, somewhat to her astonishment, he
forthwith waded into the river.  Then he turned and held out his hand
to her.

"It isn't a very long step.  You ought to manage it," he said.

The girl favoured him with a swift glance of scrutiny.  At first she
had supposed him to be one of the walking tourists or climbers who
invaded those valleys at Easter; but they were, for the most part,
young men from the cities, and this stranger's face was darkened by the
sun.  There was also an indefinite suggestion of strength in the pose
of his lean, symmetrical figure, which, though she did not recognise
that fact, could only have come from strenuous labour in the open air.
She, however, noticed that while the average Englishman would have
asked permission to help her, or have deprecated the offer, this
stranger did nothing of the kind.  He stood with the water frothing
about his ankles, holding out his hand.

She had no hesitation about taking it, and while he waded through the
river she stepped lightly from stone to stone until she came to a
rather wider gap, where the stream was deeper.  Then she stopped a
moment, gazing at the sliding froth, until the man's grasp tightened on
her fingers, and she felt his other hand rest upon her waist.

"Now," he said, "I won't let you fall."

[Illustration: "'Now,' he said, 'I won't let you fall.'"]

She was across the gap in another moment, wondering somewhat uneasily
why she had obeyed the compelling pressure, but glad to see that his
face was perfectly unmoved, and that he was evidently quite unconscious
of having done anything unusual.  She crossed without mishap, and when
they stood on the shingle he dropped her hand.

"Thank you," she said.  "I'm afraid you got rather wet."

The man laughed, and he had a pleasant laugh.  "Oh," he said, "I'm used
to it.  Isn't there a village with a hotel in it, a mile or two from
here?"

"Yes," said the girl, "this is the way.  The path goes up to the high
road through the larch wood."

She turned into it, and, though she had not expected this, the man
walked beside her.  Still, she did not resent it.  His manner was
deferential, and she liked his face, while there was, after all, no
reason why he should stay behind when he was going the same way.  He
accompanied her silently for several minutes as they went on through
the gloom of the larches, where a sweet, resinous odour crept into the
still, evening air, and then he looked up as they came to a towering
pine.

"Have you got many of those trees over here?" he asked.

Then a light dawned upon the girl, for, though he had spoken without
perceptible accent, she had been slightly puzzled by something in his
speech and appearance.

"I believe they're not uncommon.  You are an American?" she said.

Wyllard laughed.  "No," he said.  "I was born in Western Canada, but I
think I'm as English as you are, in some respects, though I never quite
realised it until to-night.  It isn't exactly because my father came
from this country, either."

The girl was a trifle astonished at this answer, and still more at the
indefinite something in his manner which seemed to indicate that he
expected her to understand, as, indeed, she did.  Her only dowry had
been an expensive education, and she remembered that the influence of
the isle she lived in had in turn fastened on Saxons, Norsemen,
Normans, and made them Englishmen.  What was more, so far as she had
read, those who had gone out South or Westwards had carried that
influence with them and, under all their surface changes, and sometimes
their grievances against the Motherland, were, in the great essentials,
wholly English still.

"But," she said at random, "how can you be sure that I'm English?"

It was quite dark in among the trees, but she fancied there was a smile
in her companion's eyes.

"Oh," he answered simply, "you couldn't be anything else!"

She accepted this as a compliment, though she fancied that it had not
been his direct intention to pay her one.  His general attitude since
she had met him scarcely suggested such a lack of sense.  She was
becoming mildly interested in this stranger, but she possessed several
essentially English characteristics, and it did not appear advisable to
encourage him too much.  She said nothing further, and it was he who
spoke first.

"I wonder," he said, "if you knew a young lad who went out to Canada
some few years ago.  His name was Pattinson--Henry Pattinson."

"No," said his companion, "I certainly did not.  Besides, the name is
not an uncommon one.  There are a good many Pattinsons in the North."

Wyllard was not astonished at this answer.  He had reasons for
believing that the name the lad he had befriended had enrolled himself
under was not his correct one.  It would, of course, have been easy to
describe him, but Wyllard was shrewd, and noticing that there was now a
restraint in his companion's manner he was not prepared to do that yet.
He was aware that most of the English are characterised by a certain
reserve, and apt to retire into their shells if pressed too hard.  He
did not, however, mean to let this girl elude him altogether.

"It really doesn't matter," he said, "I shall no doubt get upon his
trail in due time."

They reached the high road a minute or two later, and the girl turned
to him.

"Thank you again," she said.  "If you go straight on you will come to
the village in about a quarter of an hour."

Then she turned away and left him standing with his soft hat in his
hand, and, as it happened, he stood quite still for almost a minute
after she had gone.  In due time, however, he reached the inn he had
inquired about, and its old-world simplicity delighted him.  It was
built, feet thick, of slate stone, against the foot of the fell, and
roofed, as he noticed, with ponderous flags.  In Canada, where the
frost was Arctic, they used thin cedar shingles.  The room his meal was
brought him in was panelled with oak that had turned black with age.
Great rough-hewn beams of four times the size that anybody would have
used for the purpose in the West supported the low ceiling, and--for
there was a fire on the wide hearth--the ruddy gleam of burnished
copper utensils pierced the shadows.  The room was large, and there was
only a single candle upon the table, but he felt that a garish light
would somehow be out of harmony with the atmosphere of that interior.

By and bye his hostess appeared to clear the things away, and she was a
little, withered old woman, immaculately neat, with shrewd, kindly
eyes, and a russet tinge in her cheeks.

"There's a good light, and company in the sitting-room," she said.
"We've three young men staying with us.  They've been up the Pike."

"I'd sooner stay here, if I may," said Wyllard.  "I don't quite know
yet if I'll go on to-morrow.  One can get through to Langley Dale by
the Hause, as I think you call it?"

The wrinkled dame said that pedestrians often went that way, and
Wyllard asked a question casually.

"There are some prosperous folks--people of station living round here?

"There's the vicar.  I don't know that he's what you'd call prosperous.
Then there's Mr. Martindale, of Rushyholme, and Little, of the Ghyll."

"Has any of them a daughter of about twenty-four years of age?" and
Wyllard described the girl he had met to the best of his ability.

It was evident that the landlady did not recognise the description, but
she seemed to consider.

"No," she said, "there's nobody like that; but I did hear that they'd a
young lady staying at the vicarage."

Then she changed the subject abruptly, and Wyllard once more decided
that the English did not like questions.

"You're a stranger, sir?" she said.

"I am," said Wyllard.  "I've some business to attend to further on, but
I came along on foot, to see the fells, and I'm glad I did.  It's a
great and wonderful country you're living in.  That is," he added
gravely, "when you get outside the towns.  There are things in some of
them that most make one ill."

Then he stood up.  "That tray's too heavy for you.  Won't you let me
carry it?"

The landlady seemed astonished, but she made it clear that she desired
no assistance, and when she went out Wyllard, who sat down again, took
out the photograph.  He gazed at it steadfastly, and then put it back
into his pocket.

"There's rather more than mere prettiness there, but I don't know that
I want to keep it now," he said.  "It's way behind the original.  She
has grown in the meanwhile--just as one would expect that girl to grow."

Then he lighted his pipe, and smoked thoughtfully until he appeared to
arrive at a decision.

"One can't force the running in this country.  They don't like it," he
said.  "I'll lie by a day or two, and keep an eye on that vicarage."

In the meanwhile his hostess was discussing him with a niece.

"I'm sure I don't know what that man is," she informed the younger
woman.  "He has got the manners of a gentleman, but he walks like a
fell shepherd, and his hands are like a navvy's.  A man's hands now and
then tell you a good deal about him.  Besides, of all things, he wanted
to carry his tray away.  Said it was too heavy for me."

"Oh," said her niece, "he's an American.  There's no accounting for
them."




CHAPTER VI.

HER PICTURE.

Wyllard stayed at the inn three days without seeing anything more of
the girl he had met beside the stream, though he diligently watched for
her.  For one thing, he had long felt it was his duty to communicate
with the relatives of the lad he had befriended, and the fact that he
had found her photograph in the young Englishman's possession made it
appear highly probable that she could assist him in tracing them.
Apart from this, he could not quite analyse his motives for desiring to
see more of her, though he was conscious of the desire.  Her picture
had, however, been a companion to him in his wanderings, and he had,
indeed, now and then found a certain solace in gazing at it, while now
he had seen her in the flesh he was willing to admit that he had never
met any woman who had made the same impression on him.  What he meant
by that he was not quite certain; but it was in the meanwhile as far as
he would go.

It was, of course, open to him to call at the vicarage, but though he
meant to adopt that course as a last resort, there were certain
objections to it.  He did not even know the girl's name, and there was
nobody to say a word for him; while, so far as his experience went, the
English were rather apt to be reticent and reserved to an unknown
stranger.  It seemed to him that, although she might give him the
information he required, their acquaintance would probably terminate
then and there, which was not what he desired.  She would, he decided,
be less likely to stand upon her guard if he could contrive to meet her
casually without pre-arrangement.

On the fourth day fortune favoured him, for he came upon her
endeavouring to open a tottering gate where a stony hill track led off
from the smooth white road.  As it happened, he had received a letter
from Mrs. Hastings that morning, fixing the date of her departure,
which rendered it necessary for him to discharge the duty Hawtrey had
saddled him with as soon as possible.  The Grange, where he understood
Miss Ismay was then staying, lay thirty miles away across the fells,
and he had already decided to start early on the morrow.  That being
the case, it was clear that he must make the most of this opportunity;
but he also realised that it would be advisable to proceed
circumspectly.  Saying nothing, he set his shoulder to the gate, and
lifting it on its decrepit hinges swung it open.

"Thank you," said the girl, and then, remembering that this was the
last thing she had said to him, she smiled, as she added, "It is the
second time you have turned up when I was in difficulties."

In spite of his resolution to proceed cautiously, a twinkle crept into
Wyllard's eyes, and suggested that the fact she had mentioned was not
so much of a coincidence as it probably appeared.  She saw it, and was
about to pass on, when he stopped her with a gesture.  He was, after
all, usually a candid person.

"The fact is, I have been looking out for you the last three days," he
said.

He fancied the girl had taken alarm at this, and spread his hands out
deprecatingly.  "Won't you hear me out?" he added.  "There's a matter I
must put before you, but I won't keep you long."

His companion was a little puzzled, and naturally curious.  It struck
her as somewhat strange that his rather startling admission should have
roused in her very little indignation; but she felt that it would be
unreasonable to suspect this man of anything that savoured of
impertinence.  His manner was reassuring, and she liked his face.

"Well?" she said inquiringly.

The man indicated a big oak trunk that lay just inside the gate.

"If you'll sit down, I'll get through as quick as I can," he said.  "In
the first place, I am, as I told you, a Canadian, come over partly to
see the country, and partly to carry out one or two duties.  In regard
to one of them, I believe you can help me."

His companion's face was expressive of a very natural astonishment.

"I could help you?"

Wyllard nodded.  "I'll explain my reasons for believing it later on,"
he said.  "In the meanwhile, I asked you a question the other night,
which I'll now try to make more explicit.  Were you ever acquainted
with a young Englishman who went to Canada from this country several
years ago?  He would be about twenty then, and had dark hair and eyes.
That, of course, isn't an unusual thing, but there was a rather curious
white mark on his left temple.  If he was ever a friend of yours, that
scar ought to fix it."

"Oh!" said the girl, "that must have been Lance Radcliffe.  I was with
him when the scar was made--ever so long ago.  But you said his name
was Pattinson--and we heard that he was dead."

"I did," said Wyllard gravely.  "Still, I wasn't quite sure of it, and
he's certainly dead.  I buried him."

His companion made a little abrupt movement, and he saw the sudden
softening of her eyes.  There was, however, only a gentle pity in them,
and nothing in her manner suggested the deeper feeling he had
half-expected.  That was also a relief to him.

"Then," she said, "I am sure that his father would like to meet you.
There was some trouble between them--I don't know which was wrong--and
Lance went out to Canada, and never wrote.  By and bye, Major Radcliffe
tried to trace him through a Vancouver banker, and only found that he
had died in the hands of a stranger who had done all that was possible
for him."  She turned to Wyllard with a look which set his heart
beating rather faster than usual.  "You are that man?"

"Yes," said Wyllard simply, "I did what I could for him.  It didn't
amount to very much.  He was too far gone."

Then at her request he told her the story he had told to Hawtrey, and
when he had finished her face was soft again, for it had stirred her
curiously.

"But," she said, "he had no claim on you."

Wyllard lifted one hand as if in expostulation.  "He was dying in the
bush.  Wasn't that enough?"

The girl made no answer for a moment or two.  She had earned her living
for several years, and was, because of it, to some extent acquainted
with the grim realities of life.  She did not know that while there are
certainly hard men in Canada, the small farmers and ranchers of the
West--and, perhaps above all, the fearless free lances who build
railroads and grapple with giant trees in the forests of the Pacific
slope--are, as a rule, distinguished by a splendid charity.  With them
the sick or worn-out stranger is very seldom turned away.  Still,
watching her companion covertly, she understood that this man whom she
had seen for the first time three days ago had done exactly what she
would have expected of him.  Then she proceeded to give him the
information she supposed he desired.

"I saw a good deal of Lance Radcliffe--when I was younger," she said.
"His people still live at Garside Scar, close by Dufton Holme.  I
presume you will call on them?"

Wyllard said that he proposed doing so as he had a watch and one or two
other mementoes that they might like to have, and when she told him how
to reach Dufton Holme by a very round-about railway journey he supposed
it lay somewhere in the dale to which he already purposed going.  Then
she turned to him again.

"There is one point that rather puzzles me," she said.  "How did you
know that I could tell you anything about him?"

The man thrust his hand into his pocket, and took out a little leather
case.

"You are by no means a stranger to me," he said, and quietly handed her
the photograph.  "This is your picture; I found it among the dead lad's
things."

The girl, who started visibly, flashed a very keen glance at him.
There was, however, no doubt that he had not intended to produce any
dramatic effect.  Then she flushed a little.

"I never knew he had it," she said.  "Perhaps he got it from his
sister."  She paused, and then, as though impelled to make the fact
quite clear, added, "I certainly never gave it him."

Wyllard smiled gravely, for he recognised that while she was clearly
grieved to hear of his death, she could have had no particular
tenderness for the unfortunate lad.  He was, however, a little off his
guard just then.

"Well," he said, "perhaps he took it in the first place for the mere
beauty of it, and it afterwards became a companion--something that
connected him with the Old Country.  It appealed in one of those ways
to me."

Again she flashed a sharp glance at him, but he went on unheeding:

"When I found it I meant to keep it merely as a clue, and so that it
could be given up to his relatives some day," he added.  "Then I fell
into the habit of looking at it in my lonely camp in the bush at night,
and when I sat beside the stove while the snow lay deep upon the
prairie.  There was something in your eyes that seemed to encourage me."

"To encourage you?"

"Yes," Wyllard assented gravely; "I think that expresses it.  When I
camped in the bush of the Pacific slope we were either out on the gold
trail--and we generally came back ragged and unsuccessful after
spending several months' wages which we could badly spare--or I was
going from one wooden town to another without a dollar in my pocket and
wondering, how I was to obtain one when I got there.  For a time it
wasn't much more cheerful on the prairie: twice in succession the
harvest failed.  Perhaps Lance Radcliffe felt as I did."

The girl cut him short.  "Why didn't you mention the photograph at
once?"

Wyllard smiled at her.  "Oh," he said, "I didn't want to be
precipitate--your folks don't seem to like that; I've met them out
West.  I think"--and he seemed to consider--"I wanted to make sure you
wouldn't be repelled by what might look like Colonial _brusquerie_.
You see, you have been over snow-barred divides and through great
shadowy forests with me.  We've camped among the boulders by lonely
lakes, and gone down frothing rapids.  I felt--I can't tell you
why--that I was bound to meet you some day."

It was, perhaps, a trifle startling, but the girl now showed neither
astonishment nor resentment.  She felt curiously certain that this
stranger was not posing or speaking for effect.  It did not occur to
him that he might have gone too far, and for a space he leaned against
the gate, saying nothing, while she looked at him with what he thought
of as her gracious English calm.

Pale sunshine fell upon them, though the larches beside the road were
rustling beneath a little cold wind, and the song of the river came up
brokenly out of the valley.  An odour of fresh grass floated about
them, and the dry, cold smell of the English spring was in the air.
Across the valley dim ghosts of hills lighted by evanescent gleams rose
out of the east wind greyness with shadowy grandeur.

Then Wyllard seemed to rouse himself.  "I wonder if I ought to write
Major Radcliffe and tell him what my object is before I call?" he said.
"It would make the thing a little easier."

The girl rose.  "Yes," she assented, "that would, perhaps, be wiser."
Then she glanced at the photograph which was still in her hand.  "It
has served its purpose.  I scarcely think it would be of any great
interest to Major Radcliffe."

She saw his face change as she made it evident that she did not mean to
give the portrait back to him; but there was, at least, one excellent
reason why she would not have her picture in a strange man's hands.

"Thank you," she said, "for the story.  I am glad we have met; but I'm
afraid I have already kept my friends waiting for me."

Then she turned away, and it occurred to Wyllard that he had made a
very indifferent use of the opportunity, since she had neither asked
his name nor told him hers.  It was, however, evident that he could not
well run after her and demand it, and he decided that he could in all
probability obtain it from Major Radcliffe when he called upon him.
Still, he regretted his lack of adroitness as he walked back to the
inn, where he wrote two letters when he had consulted a map and his
landlady.  Dufton Holme, he discovered, was a small village within a
mile or two of the Grange where, as Miss Rawlinson had informed him,
Agatha Ismay was then staying.  One letter was addressed to her, and he
formally asked permission to call upon her with a message from Gregory
Hawtrey.  The other was to Major Radcliffe, and in both he said that an
answer would reach him at the inn which his landlady had informed him
was to be found not far from either of the houses he proposed to visit.

He set out on foot next morning, and after climbing a steep pass
followed a winding track across a waste of empty moor until he struck a
smooth white road, which led past a rock-girt lake and into a deep
valley.  It was six o'clock when he started, and three when he reached
the inn, where he found an answer to one of his letters awaiting him.
It was from Major Radcliffe, who desired an interview with him as soon
as possible.

Within an hour he was on his way to the Major's house, where a
grey-haired man, whose yellow skin suggested long exposure to a
tropical sun, and a little withered lady were waiting for him.  They
received him graciously, but there was an indefinite something in their
manner and bearing which Wyllard, who had read a good deal, recognised,
though he had never been brought into actual contact with it until
then.  He felt that he could not have expected to come across such
people anywhere but in England, unless it was at the headquarters of a
British battalion in India.

He told his story tersely, softening unpleasant details, and making
little of what he had done, and the grey-haired man listened gravely
with an unmoved face, though a trace of moisture crept into the little
lady's eyes.  There was silence for a moment or two when he had
finished, and then Major Radcliffe, whose manner was very quiet, turned
to him.

"You have laid me under an obligation which I could never wipe out,
even if I wished it," he said.  "It was my only son you buried out
there in Canada."

He broke off for a moment, and his quietness was more marked than ever
when he went on again.

"As you have no doubt surmised, we quarrelled," he said.  "He was
extravagant and careless--at least I thought that then--but now it
seems to me that I was unduly hard on him.  His mother"--and he turned
to the little lady with an inclination that pleased Wyllard
curiously--"was sure of it at the time.  In any case, I took the wrong
way, and he went out to Canada.  I made that, at least, easy for
him--and I have been sorry ever since."

He paused again with a little expressive gesture.  "It seems due to
him, and you, that I should tell you this.  When no word reached us I
had inquiries made, through a banker he called upon, who, discovering
that he had registered at a hotel as Pattinson, at length traced him to
a British Columbian silver mine.  He had, however, left it shortly
before my correspondent learned that he had been employed there, and
all the latter could tell me was that an unknown prospector had nursed
him until he died."

Wyllard, who said nothing, took out a watch and the clasp of a
workman's belt from his pocket, and laid them gently on Mrs.
Radcliffe's knee.  He saw her eyes fill, and turned his head away.

"I feel that you may blame me for not writing sooner, but it was only a
very little while ago that I was able to trace you, and then it was
only by a very curious--coincidence," he said presently.

This was the most apposite word that occurred to him, for he did not
consider it advisable to mention the photograph.  It seemed to him that
the girl would not like it.  Nor, though he was greatly tempted, did he
care to make inquiries concerning her just then.  In another moment or
two the Major spoke again.

"If I can make your stay here pleasanter in any way I should be
delighted," he said.  "If you will take up your quarters with us I will
send down to the inn for your things."

Wyllard excused himself, but when the lady urged him at least to dine
with them on the following evening he appeared to consider.

"The one difficulty is that I don't know yet whether I shall be engaged
then," he explained.  "As it happens, I've a message for Miss Ismay,
and I wrote offering to call upon her at any convenient hour.  So far I
have heard nothing from her."

"She's away," Mrs. Radcliffe informed him.  "They have probably sent
your letter on to her.  I had a note from her yesterday, however, and
expect her here to-morrow.  You have met some friends of hers in
Canada?"

"Gregory Hawtrey," said Wyllard.  "I have promised to call upon his
people, too."

He saw Major Radcliffe glance at his wife, and the faint gleam in the
latter's eyes.

"Well," she said, "if you will promise to come I will send word over to
Agatha."

Wyllard agreed to this, and went away a few minutes later.  He noticed
the tact and consideration with which his new friends had refrained
from expressing any sign of the curiosity he fancied they naturally
felt, for Mrs. Radcliffe's face had suggested that she understood the
situation.  The latter was, however, commencing to appear a little more
difficult to him.  It was, it seemed, his task to explain to a girl
brought up among such people delicately what she must be prepared to
face as a farmer's wife in Western Canada.  He was not sure that this
would be easy in itself, but it was rendered much more difficult by the
fact that Hawtrey would expect him to accomplish it without unduly
daunting her.  Her letter had certainly suggested courage, but, after
all, it was as he reflected the courage of ignorance, and he had now
some notion of the life of ease and refinement her English friends led.
He was commencing to feel sorry for Agatha Ismay.




CHAPTER VII.

AGATHA DOES NOT FLINCH.

Next evening Wyllard sat with Mrs. Radcliffe in a big low-ceilinged
room at Garside Scar, looking about him with quiet interest.  He had
now and then spent a day or two in huge Western hotels, but he had
never seen anything quite like that room.  The sheer physical comfort
of its arrangements appealed to him, but after all he was not one who
had ever studied his bodily ease very much, and what he regarded as the
chaste refinement of its adornment had a deeper effect.  Though he had
lived for the most part in the bush and on the prairie, he had been
endued with or had somehow acquired an artistic susceptibility.

The furniture was old, and perhaps a trifle shabby, but it was, as he
noticed, of beautiful design.  Curtains, carpets, tinted walls, formed,
it seemed to him, a harmony of soft colouring, and there were scattered
here and there dainty works of art, little statuettes from Italy, and
wonderful Indian ivory and silver work.  Then a row of low,
stone-ribbed windows pierced the front of the room, and looking out he
saw the trim garden lying in the warm evening light.  Immediately
beneath the windows ran a broad gravelled terrace, which was apparently
raked smooth every day, with a row of urns in which hyacinths bloomed
upon its pillared wall.  From the middle of it a wide stairway led down
to the wonderful velvet lawn, which was dotted with clumps of cupressus
with golden gleams in it, and beyond that clipped yews rose smooth and
solid as a rampart of stone.

It all impressed him curiously--the order and beauty of it, the signs
of loving care.  It gave him a key, he fancied, to the lives the
cultured English led, for there was no sign of strain and fret and
stress and hurry here.  Everything, it seemed, went smoothly with
rhythmic regularity, and though it is possible that a good many
Englishmen would have regarded Garside Scar as a very second-rate
country house, and seen in Major Radcliffe and his wife nothing more
than a somewhat prosy old soldier and a withered lady, old-fashioned in
her dress and views, this Westerner had what was, perhaps, a clearer
vision.  He could imagine the Major standing fast at any cost upon some
minute point of honour, and it seemed to him that his lady might have
stepped down from some old picture with all the graces of an earlier
age and the smell of the English lavender upon her garments.  Then he
remembered that, after all, Englishwomen lived somewhat coarsely in the
Georgian days, and that he had met hard-handed men grimed with dust and
sweat who could also stand fast by a point of honour in Western Canada.
Though the latter fact did not occur to him, he had, for that matter,
done it more than once himself.

Then he recalled his wandering thoughts as his hostess smiled at him.

"You are interested in all you see?" she asked frankly.

"Yes, madam," said Wyllard--and the word rose instinctively to his
lips, for it seemed to him the only fitting way to address her.  "In
fact, I'd like to spend some hours here and look at everything.  I'd
begin at the pictures and work right round."

His companion's smile suggested that she was not displeased.

"But you have been in London?"

"I have," said Wyllard.  "I had one or two letters to folks there from
big flour shippers, and they did all they could to entertain me.
Still, their places were different; they hadn't the--charm--of yours.
It's something which I think could only exist in these still valleys
and in cathedral closes.  It strikes me more because it is something
I've never been accustomed to."

The lady was interested, and fancied that she partly understood his
attitude.

"Your life is necessarily different from ours," she suggested.

Wyllard smiled.  "It's so different that you couldn't realise it.  It's
all strain and effort from early sunrise until after dusk at night.
Bodily strain of aching muscles, and mental stress in adverse seasons.
We scarcely think of comfort, and never dream of artistic luxury.  The
dollars we raise are sunk again in seed and extra teams and ploughs."

"After all, a good many people are driven rather hard by the love of
money here."

"No," said Wyllard gravely, "that's not it exactly.  At least, not with
most of us.  It's rather the pride of wresting another quarter-section
from the prairie, taking--our own--by labour, breaking the wilderness.
You"--and he added this as though to explain that he could hardly
expect her to quite grasp his views--"have never been out West?"

His hostess laughed.  "I have stayed down in the plains through the hot
season in stifling cantonments, and I have once or twice been in Indian
cholera camps.  Besides, I have seen my husband sitting, haggard and
worn with fever, in his saddle holding back a clamorous crowd that
surged about him half-mad with religious fury.  There were Hindus and
Moslems to be kept from flying at each others' throats, and at a
tactless word or sign of wavering either party would have pulled him
down."

"You'll have to forgive me, madam"--and Wyllard's gesture was
deprecatory, though his eyes twinkled.  "The notion that we're the only
ones who really work, or, at least, do anything worth while, is rather
a favourite one out West.  No doubt it's a delusion.  I should have
known that all of us are born like that."

His hostess forgave him readily, if only for the "all of us," which
struck her as especially fortunate.  A few minutes later there were
voices in the hall, and then the door opened, and the girl he had met
at the stepping stones came in.  She was dressed differently, in
trailing garments which, it seemed to him, became her wonderfully, and
he noticed now the shapely delicacy of her hands and the fine, ivory
pallor of her skin.  Then his hostess turned to him.

"I had better present you formally to Miss Ismay," she said.  "Agatha,
this is Mr. Wyllard, who I understand has brought you a message from
Canada."

There was no doubt that Wyllard was blankly astonished, and for a
moment the girl was clearly startled, too.

"You!" was all she said.

[Illustration: "'You!' was all she said."

She, however, held her hand out before she turned to speak to Mrs.
Radcliffe, but it was a slight relief to both when somebody announced
that dinner was ready.

Wyllard sat next to his hostess, and was not sorry that he was only
called upon to take part in casual general conversation, though he
fancied once or twice that Miss Ismay was unobtrusively studying him.
It was also nearly an hour after the meal was over when Mrs. Radcliffe
left them alone in her little drawing-room.

"You have, no doubt, a good deal to talk about, and you needn't join us
until you're ready," she said.  "The Major always reads the London
papers after dinner."

Agatha sat down in a low chair near the hearth, and it first of all
occurred to Wyllard, who took a place opposite her, that she was,
although of full stature, too delicate and dainty, too over-cultivated,
in fact, to marry Hawtrey.  This was rather curious, since he had
hitherto regarded his comrade as a typical, well-educated Englishman;
but it now seemed to him that there was a certain streak of coarseness
in Gregory.  The man, it suddenly flashed upon him, was self-indulgent,
and his careless ease of manner, which he had once liked, was rather
too much in evidence.  In a few moments, however, Agatha turned to him.

"I understand that Gregory is recovering rapidly?" she said.

Wyllard assured her that this was the case, and Agatha said quietly,
"He wants me to go out to him."

Wyllard felt that if a girl of this kind had promised to marry him he
would not have sent for her but have come in person, if he had been
compelled to pledge his last possessions, or crawl to the tideway on
his hands and knees.  For all that, he was ready to defend his friend.

"I'm afraid it's necessary," he said.  "Gregory was quite unfit for
such a journey when I left, and he must be ready to commence the
season's campaign with the first of the spring.  Our summer is short,
you see, and with our one-crop farming it's indispensable to get the
seed in early: in fact, he will be badly behind as it is."

This was not particularly tactful since, without intending it, he made
it evident that he felt his comrade had been to some extent remiss; but
Agatha smiled.

"Oh," she said, "I understand!  You needn't labour the excuse.  But
doesn't the same thing apply to you?"

"It certainly did.  Now, however, things have become a little easier.
My holding's larger than Gregory's, and I have a foreman who can look
after it for me."

"Gregory said that you were a great friend of his."

Wyllard seized this opportunity.  "He is a great friend of mine, and I
like to think it means the same thing.  In fact, it's reasonably
certain that he saved my life for me."

"Ah!" said Agatha; "that is a thing he didn't mention.  How did it come
about?"

Wyllard was glad to tell the story: he was anxious to say all he
honestly could in Hawtrey's favour.

"We were at work on a railroad trestle--a towering wooden bridge, in
British Columbia.  It stretched across a deep ravine with great
boulders and a stream in the bottom of it, and we stood high up on a
staging close beneath the metals.  A fast freight, a huge general
produce train, came down the track, with one of the new big locomotives
hauling it, and when the cars went banging by above us we could hardly
hold on to the bridge.  Still, the construction foreman was a hustler,
and we had to get the spikes in.  I was swinging the hammer when I felt
the plank beneath me slip.  The train, it seems, had jarred the bolt we
had our lashings round loose.  For a moment I felt that I was going
down into the gorge, and then Gregory leaned out and grabbed me.  He
had only one free hand to do it with, and when he felt my weight one
foot swung out from the stringer he had sprung to.  It seemed certain
that I would pull him with me, too.  We hung like that for a space--I
don't quite know how long."

He paused for a moment, apparently feeling the stress of it again, and
there was a faint thrill in his voice when he went on.

"It was then," he said, "I knew just what kind of man Gregory Hawtrey
was.  Anybody else would have let me go; but he held on.  Then I got my
hand on some of the framing, and he swung me on to the stringer."

He saw the gleam in Agatha's eyes.  "Oh!" she said, "that is just what
he must have done.  He was like that always--impulsive, splendidly
generous."

Wyllard felt that he had succeeded, though he knew that there were men
on the prairie who called his comrade slackly careless, instead of
impulsive.  Agatha, however, spoke again.

"But Gregory wasn't a carpenter," she said.

"In those days when dollars were scanty we had to be whatever we could.
There wasn't much specialisation of handicrafts out there then.  The
farmer whose crop was ruined took up the railroad shovel, or borrowed a
saw from somebody and set about building houses, or anything else that
was wanted."

"Of course!" said Agatha.  "Besides, he was always wonderfully quick.
He could learn any game by just watching it awhile.  He did all he
undertook brilliantly."

It occurred to Wyllard that Gregory had, at least, made no great
success of farming; but that occupation, as practised on the prairie,
demands a good deal more than quickness and what some call brilliancy
from the man who undertakes it.  He must, as they say out there,
possess the capacity for staying with it; the grim courage to hold fast
the tighter under each crushing blow, when his teams die, or the grain
shrivels under the harvest frost, or ragged ice hurtling before a
roaring blast does the reaping.  It was, however, evident that this
girl had an unquestioning faith in Gregory Hawtrey, and once more
Wyllard felt compassionate towards her.  He wondered if she would have
retained it had the man spent those four years in England instead of
Canada: for it was clear from the contrast between her and her picture
that she had grown in many ways since she had given her promise to her
lover.  He had said what he could in Hawtrey's favour, but now he felt
that something was due to the girl.

"Gregory told me to explain what things are like out there," he said.
"I think it is because they are so different from what you are
accustomed to that he has waited as long as he has done.  He wanted to
make them as easy as possible for you, and now he would like you to
realise what is before you."

He was almost astonished at the girl's comprehension, for she glanced
round the luxurious room with a faint smile.

"You look on me as part of--this?  I mean it seems to you that I fit in
with my surroundings, and would only be in harmony with them?"

"Yes," said Wyllard gravely, "I think you fit in with them excellently."

Agatha laughed.  "Well," she said, "I was once, to a certain extent,
accustomed to something similar; though, after all, one could hardly
compare the Grange with Garside Scar.  Still, that was some time ago,
and I have earned my living for several years now.  That counts for
something, doesn't it?"

She glanced down at her dress.  "For instance, this is the result of a
good deal of self-denial, though the cost of it was partly worked off
in music lessons, and the stuff was almost the cheapest I could get.  I
sang at concerts--and it was part of my stock-in-trade.  After all, why
should you think me only capable of living in luxury?"

"I didn't quite go that far."

She laughed again.  "Then is Canada such a very dreadful place?  I have
heard of other Englishwomen going out there as farmers' wives.  Do they
all live unhappily?"

"No," said Wyllard; "at least, they show no sign of it, and some of
them and the city-born Canadians are, I think, the salt of this earth.
Probably it's easy to be calm and gracious in such a place as
this--though I naturally don't know since I've never tried it--but when
a woman who toils from sunrise to sunset most of the year keeps her
sweetness and serenity, it's a very different and much finer thing.
But I'll try to answer the other question.  The prairie isn't dreadful;
it's a land of sunshine and clear skies.  Heat and cold--and we have
them both--don't worry one there.  There's optimism in the crystal air.
It's not beautiful like these valleys, but it has its beauty.  It's
vast and silent, and, though our homesteads are crude and new, once you
pass the breaking it's primevally old.  That gets hold of one somehow.
It's wonderful after sunset in the early spring, when the little cold
wind's like wine, and it runs white to the horizon with the smoky red
on the rim of it melting into transcendental green.  When the wheat
rolls across the foreground in ochre and burnished copper waves, it's
more wonderful still.  One sees the fulfilment of the promise, and
takes courage."

"Then," said Agatha, who had scarcely suspected him of a capacity for
such flights as this, "what is there to shrink from?"

"In the case of a small farmer's wife, the constant, never-slackening
strain.  There's no hired assistance; she must clean the house, and
wash, and cook--though it's not unusual for the men to wash the plates."

The girl was evidently not much impressed, for she laughed.

"Does Gregory wash the plates?" she asked.

Wyllard's eyes twinkled.  "When Sproatly won't," he said.  "Still, in a
general way they only do it once a week."

"Ah," said Agatha, "I can imagine Gregory hating it.  As a matter of
fact, I like him for it."

"Then she must bake, and mend her husband's clothes.  Indeed, it's not
unusual for her to mend for the hired man too.  Besides that, there are
always odds and ends of tasks, but the time when you feel the strain
most is in the winter.  Then you sit at night, shivering, as a rule,
beside the stove in an almost empty log-walled room, reading a book you
have probably read three or four times before.  Outside, the frost is
Arctic; you can hear the roofing shingles crackle now and then; and you
wake up when the fire burns low.  There's no life, no company, rarely a
new face, and if you go to a dance or supper somewhere, perhaps once a
month, you ride back on a bob-sled frozen almost stiff beneath the
robes."

"Still," said Agatha, "that does not last."

The man understood her.  "Oh!" he said, "one makes progress--that is,
if one can stand the strain--but, as the one way of doing it is to sow
for a larger harvest and break fresh sod every year, there can be no
slackening down in the meanwhile.  Every dollar must be guarded and
ploughed into the soil again."

He broke off, feeling that he had done all that could reasonably be
expected of him, and Agatha asked one question.

"A woman who didn't slacken could make the struggle easier for the man?"

"Yes," said Wyllard simply, "in every way.  Still, she would have a
great deal to bear."

Agatha's face softened.  "Ah," she said, "she would not grudge the
effort in the case of one she loved."

Then she looked up again with a smile.  "I wonder," she added, "if you
really thought I should flinch."

"When I first heard of it, I thought it quite likely.  Then when I read
your letter my doubts vanished."

He saw he had not been judicious, for there was, for the first time, a
trace of hardness in the girl's expression.

"He showed you that?" she asked.

"One small part of it," said Wyllard.  "I want to say that when I saw
this house, and how you seemed fitted to it, my misgivings about
Gregory's decision troubled me once more.  Now"--and he made a little
impressive gesture--"they have vanished altogether, and they'll never
come back again."

He spoke as he felt.  This girl, he fancied, would feel the strain; but
it seemed to him that she had strength enough to bear it cheerfully.
In spite of her daintiness, she was one who, in time of stress, could
be depended on.  He often remembered afterwards how they had sat
together in the little, luxuriously furnished room, she leaning back,
with the soft light on her delicately tinted face, in her big, low
chair.  In the meanwhile she said nothing, and by and bye he looked up
at her.

"It's curious that I had your photograph ever so long, and never
thought of showing it Gregory," he said.

Agatha smiled.  "I suppose it is," she admitted.  "After all, except
that it might have been a relief to Major Radcliffe if he had met you
sooner, the fact that you didn't show it Gregory doesn't seem of any
particular consequence."

Wyllard was not quite sure of this.  He had thought about this girl
often, and had certainly been conscious of a curious thrill of
satisfaction when he had met her at the stepping-stones a few days
earlier.  That feeling had also suddenly disappeared when he had
learned that she was his comrade's promised wife.  He had, however,
during the last hour or two made up his mind to think no more of her.

"Well," he said, "the next thing is to arrange for Mrs. Hastings to
meet you in London, or, perhaps, at the Grange.  Her husband is a
Canadian, a man of education, who has quite a large homestead not far
from Gregory's.  Her folks are people of station in Montreal, and I
feel sure that you'll like her."

They decided that he was to ask Mrs. Hastings to stay a few days at the
Grange, and then he looked at the girl somewhat diffidently.

"She suggests going in a fortnight," he said.

Agatha smiled at him.  "Then," she said, "I must not keep her waiting."

She rose, and they went back together to join their hostess.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE TRAVELLING COMPANION.

A grey haze, thickened by the smoke of the city, drove out across the
water when the _Scarrowmania_ lay in the Mersey, with her cable hove
short, and the last of the flood tide gurgling against her bows.  A
trumpeting blast of steam swept high aloft from beside her squat
funnel, and the splash of the slowly turning paddles of the couple of
steam tugs that lay alongside mingled with the din it made.  A gangway
from one of them led to the _Scarrowmania's_ forward deck, and a stream
of frowsy humanity that had just been released from overpacked emigrant
boarding-houses poured up it.  There were apparently representatives of
all peoples and languages among that unkempt horde--Britons,
Scandinavians, Teutons, Italians, Russians, Poles--and they moved on in
forlorn apathy, like cattle driven to the slaughter.  One wondered,
from the look of them, how they had raised their passage money, and how
many years' bitter self-denial it had cost them to provide for their
transit to the land of promise.

At the head of the gangway stood the steamboat doctors, for the
_Scarrowmania_ was taking out an unusual number of passengers, and
there were two of them.  They were immaculate in blue uniform, and
looked very clean and English by contrast with the mass of frowsy
aliens.  Beside them stood another official, presumably acting on
behalf of the Dominion Government, though there were few restrictions
imposed upon Canadian immigration then, nor for that matter did anybody
trouble much about the comfort of the steerage passengers.  Though they
have altered all that latterly, each steamer, in a general way, carried
as many as she could hold.

As the stream poured out of the gangway, the doctor glanced at each new
comer's face, and then seizing him by the wrist uncovered it.  Since
this took him two or three seconds, one could have fancied that he
either possessed peculiar powers, or that the test was a somewhat
inefficient one.  Then he looked at the official, who made a sign, and
the man moved on.

In the meanwhile a group of first-class passengers leaning on the
thwart-ship rails close by looked on, with complacent satisfaction with
the fact that they were born in a different station, or
half-contemptuous pity, as their temperament varied.  Among them stood
Mrs. Hastings, Miss Winifred Rawlinson, and Agatha.  The latter noticed
that Wyllard sat on a hatch forward near the head of the gangway, with
a pipe in his hand.  She drew Mrs. Hastings's attention to it.

"Whatever is Mr. Wyllard doing there?" she asked.

Her companion, who was wrapped in furs, for there was a sting in the
east wind, smiled at her.

"That," she said, "is more than I can tell you; but Harry Wyllard seems
to find an interest in what other folks would consider most unpromising
things, and, what's more to the purpose, he's rather addicted to taking
a hand in.  It's a habit that costs him something now and then."

Agatha asked nothing further.  She was interested in Wyllard, but she
was at the moment more interested in the faces of those who swarmed on
board.  She wondered what they had endured in the lands that had cast
them out, and what they might still have to bear.  It seemed to her
that the murmur of their harsh voices went up in a great protest, an
inarticulate cry of sorrow.  While she looked on the doctor held back a
long-haired man who was following a haggard woman shuffling in broken
boots.  He drew him aside, and when, after he had apparently consulted
with the other official, two seamen hustled the man towards a second
gangway that led to the tug, the woman raised a wild, despairing cry.
It, however, seemed that she blocked the passage, and a quartermaster
drove her, expostulating in an agony of terror, forward among the rest.
Nobody appeared concerned about this alien's tragedy, except one man,
but Agatha was not astonished when Wyllard rose and quietly laid his
hand upon the official's shoulder.

A parley appeared to follow, somebody gave an order, and when the alien
was led back again the woman's cries subsided.  Agatha looked at her
companion, and once more a smile crept into Mrs. Hastings's eyes.

"Yes," she said, "I guessed he would feel he had to stand in.  That's a
man who can't see any one in trouble."  Then she added, with a little
whimsical sigh, "He had a bonanza harvest last fall, any way."

They moved aft soon afterwards, and the _Scarrowmania_ was smoothly
sliding seawards with the first of the ebb when Agatha met Wyllard.  He
glanced at the Lancashire sandhills, which were fading into a pale
ochre gleam amidst the haze over the starboard hand, and then at the
long row of painted buoys that moved back to them ahead.

"You're off at last!  The sad grey weather is dropping fast astern," he
said.  "Out yonder, the skies are clear."

"Thank you," said Agatha, "I'm to apply that as I like?  As a matter of
fact, however, our days weren't always grey.  But what was the trouble
when those steerage people came on board?"

Wyllard's manner, as she noticed, was free alike from the complacent
self-satisfaction which occasionally characterises the philanthropist,
and any affectation of diffidence.

"Well," he said, "there was something wrong with that woman's husband.
Nothing infectious, I believe, but they didn't seem to consider him a
desirable citizen.  They make a warning example of somebody with a
physical infirmity now and then.  The man, they decided, must be put
ashore again.  In the meanwhile, somebody else had hustled the woman
forward, and it almost looked as if they'd have taken her on without
him.  The tug was almost ready to cast off."

"How dreadful!" said Agatha.  "But what did you do?"

"Merely promised to guarantee the cost of his passage back if they'd
refer his case to the immigration people at the other end.  It's
scarcely likely that they'll make trouble.  As a rule, they only throw
folks who're certain to become a charge on the community."

"But if he really had any infirmity, mightn't it lead to that?"

"No," said Wyllard drily.  "I would engage to give him a fair start if
it was necessary.  You wouldn't have had that woman landed in Montreal,
helpless and alone, while the man was sent back again to starve in
Poland?"

He saw a curious liquid gleam in Agatha's eyes, and added in a
deprecating manner, "You see, I've now and then limped without a dollar
into a British Columbian mining town."

The girl was a little stirred; but there was another matter that must
be mentioned, though she felt that the time was somewhat inopportune.

"Miss Rawlinson, who had only a second-class ticket, insists upon being
told how it is that she has been transferred to the saloon."

Wyllard's eyes twinkled, but she noticed that he was wholly free from
embarrassment, which was not quite the case with her.

"Well," he said, "that's a matter I must leave you to handle.  Anyway,
she can't go second-class now.  One or two of the steerage exchanged
when they saw their quarters, for which I don't blame them, and they've
filled every room right up."

"You haven't answered the question."

Wyllard waved his hand.  "Miss Rawlinson is your bridesmaid, and I'm
Gregory's best man.  It seems to me it's my business to do everything
just as he'd like it done."

He left her a moment later, and, though she did not know how she was to
explain the matter to Miss Rawlinson, who was of an independent
disposition, it occurred to her that he, at least, had found a rather
graceful way out of the difficulty.  The more she saw of this Western
farmer, the more she liked him.

It was after dinner when she next met him, and, for the wind had
changed, the _Scarrowmania_ was steaming head-on into a glorious
north-west breeze.  The shrouds sang; chain-guy, and stanchion, and
whatever caught the wind, set up a deep-toned throbbing; and ranks of
little, white-topped seas rolled out of the night ahead.  A half-moon
hung low above them, blurred now and then by wisps of flying cloud, and
odd spouts of spray that gleamed in the silvery light leapt up about
the dipping bows.  Wyllard was leaning on the rails, with a cigar in
his hand, when she stopped beside him, and she glanced towards the
lighted windows of the smoke-room not far away.

"How is it you are not in there?" she asked, for something to say.

"I was," said Wyllard.  "It's rather full up, and it seemed they didn't
want me.  They're busy playing cards, and the stakes are rather high.
In a general way, a steamboat's smoke-room is less of a men's lounge
than a gambling club."

"And you object to cards?"

"Oh, no!" said Wyllard.  "They merely make me tired, and when I feel I
want some excitement for my dollars I get it another way.  That one
seems tame to me."

"Which is the one you like?"

The man laughed.  "There are a good many that appeal to me.  Once it
was collecting sealskins off other people's beaches, and there was zest
enough in that, in view of the probability of the dory turning over, or
a gunboat dropping on to you.  Then there was a good deal of very
genuine excitement to be got out of placer-mining in British Columbia,
especially when there was frost in the ranges, and you had to thaw out
your giant-powder.  Shallow alluvial workings have a way of caving in
when you least expect it of them.  After all, however, I think I like
the prairie farming best."

"Is that exciting?"

"Yes," said Wyllard, "if you do it in one way.  The gold's there--that
you're sure of--piled up by nature during I don't know how many
thousand years, but you have to stake high if you want to get much of
it out.  One needs costly labour, teams--no end of them--breakers, and
big gang-plough.  The farmer who has nerve enough drills his last
dollar into the soil in spring, but if he means to succeed it costs him
more than that.  He must give the sweat of his tensest effort, the
uttermost toil of his body--all, in fact, that has been given him.
Then he must shut his eyes tight to the hazards against him, or, and we
can't all do that, look at them without wavering--the drought, the
hail, the harvest frost.  If his teams fall sick, or the season goes
against him, he must work double tides.  Still, it now and then happens
that things go right, and the red wheat rolls ripe right back across
the prairie.  I don't know that any man could want a keener thrill than
the one you feel when you drive the binders in!"

Agatha had imagination, and she could realise something of the toil,
the hazard, and the clean thrill of that victory.

"You have felt it often?" she said.

"Twice we helped to fill a big elevator up," said Wyllard quietly.
"Still, I've been very near defeat."

The girl looked at him thoughtfully.  It seemed that he possessed the
power of acquisition, as well as a wide generosity that came into play
when by strenuous effort success had been attained, which, so far as
her experience went, were things that did not invariably accompany each
other.

"And when the harvest comes up to your expectations, you give your
dollars away," she said.

Wyllard laughed.  "You shouldn't deduce too much from a single
instance.  Besides, that Pole's case hasn't cost me anything yet."

Mrs. Hastings joined them soon afterwards, and when Wyllard strolled
away they spent some time leaning on the rails, and looking at the
groups of shadowy figures on the forward deck.  Their attitude was
dejected and melancholy, but one cluster had gathered round a man who
stood upon the hatch.

"Yes," he said, "you'll have no trouble.  Canada's a great country for
a poor man.  He can sleep beneath a bush all summer, if he can't strike
anything he likes."

This did not appear particularly encouraging, but the orator went on.
"Been over for a trip to the Old Country, and I'm glad I'm going back
again.  Went out with nothing except a good discharge, and they made me
sergeant of Canadian militia: After that armourer to a rifle club.
There's places a blame long way behind the Dominion, and I struck one
of them when we went with Roberts to Afghanistan.  It was on that trip
I and a Pathan rolled all down a hill, him trying to get his knife arm
loose, and me jabbing his breastbone with my bayonet before I got it
into him.  I drove it through to the socket.  You want to make quite
sure of a Pathan."

Miss Rawlinson winced at this.  "Oh," she said, "what a horrible man!"

"It was 'most as tough as when you went after Kiel, and stole the
Scotchman's furs," suggested a Canadian.

The sergeant let the jibe go by.  "Oh," he said, "Louis's bucks could
shoot!  We had them corralled in a pit, and every time one of the boys
from Montreal broke cover he got a bullet into him.  Did any of you
ever hear a dropped man squeal?"

Agatha had heard sufficient, and she and her companions turned away,
but as they moved across the deck the sergeant's voice followed her.

"Oh, yes," he said, "a grand country for a poolman.  In the summer he
can sleep beneath a bush."

For some reason this eulogy haunted Agatha when she retired to her room
that night, and she wondered what awaited all those aliens in the new
land, until it occurred to her that in some respects she was situated
very much as they were.  Then, for the first time, vague misgivings
crept into her mind as she realised that she had cut herself adrift
from all that she had been accustomed to.  She felt suddenly depressed
and lonely.

The depression had, however, almost vanished when, awakening rather
early next morning, she went up on deck.  A red sun hung over the
tumbling seas that ran into the hazy east astern, and they rolled up in
crested phalanxes that gleamed green and incandescent white ahead.  The
_Scarrowmania_ plunged through them with a spray cloud flying about her
dipping bows.  She was a small, old-fashioned boat, and--for she had
some 3,000 tons of railway iron in the bottom of her--she rolled
distressfully.  Her tall spars swayed athwart the vivid blueness of the
morning sky, with the rhythmic regularity of a pendulum.  The girl,
however, was troubled by no sense of sickness; the keen north-wester
that sang amidst the shrouds was wonderfully fresh; and when she met
Wyllard crossing the saloon deck her cheeks were glowing from the sting
of the spray, and her eyes were bright.

"Where have you been?" she asked.

"Down there," said Wyllard, pointing to the black opening in the
fore-hatch that led to the steerage quarters.  "An acquaintance of mine
who's travelling forward asked me to take a look round, and I'm rather
glad I did.  When I've had a word with the chief steward I'm going back
again."

"You have a friend down there?"

"I met the man for the first time yesterday, and rather took to him.
One of your naval petty officers, forcibly retired, who can't live upon
his pension, which is why he's going out to Canada.  Now you'll excuse
me."

"I wonder," said Agatha, "if you would let me go back with you?"

Wyllard looked at her rather curiously.  "Well," he said, with an air
of reflection, "you'll probably have to face a good deal that you don't
like out yonder, and in one way you won't suffer from a little
preparatory training.  This, however, is not a case where sentimental
pity is likely to relieve anybody.  It's the real thing."

"I think I told you at Garside Scar that I haven't lived altogether in
luxury!"

Wyllard, who made no comment, disappeared, and merely signed to her
when he came back.  They reached the ladder that led down into the
gloom beneath the hatch, and Agatha hesitated when a sour and musty
odour floated up to her, apparently out of the depths of the ship.  She
went down, however, and a few moments later stood, half-nauseated,
gazing at the wildest scene of confusion her eyes had ever rested on.
A little light came down the hatchway, and a smoky lamp or two swung
above her head, but half the steerage deck was wrapped in shadow, and
out of it there rose a many-voiced complaining.  Flimsy, unplaned
fittings had wrenched away, and men lay inert amidst the wreckage, with
the remains of their last meal scattered about them.  There were
unwashed tin plates and pannikins, knives, and spoons, sliding up and
down everywhere, and the deck was foul with slops of tea, and trodden
bread, and marmalade.  Now and then, in a wilder roll than usual, a
frowsy, huddled object slid groaning down the slant of slimy planking,
but in every case the helpless passenger was fully dressed.  Steerage
passengers, in fact, seldom take off their clothes.  For one thing, all
their worldly possessions are, as a rule, secreted among their attire,
and for another, most of those hailing from beyond the Danube have
never been accustomed to disrobing.  In the midst of the confusion, two
half-sick steward lads were making wholly ineffective efforts to
straighten up the mess.

Then Agatha made out that a swarm of urchins were huddled together in a
helpless mass, along one side of the horrible place.  The sergeant was
haranguing them, while another man, whom she supposed to be the petty
officer, pulled them to their feet one by one.  A good deal of his
labour was wasted, for the _Scarrowmania_ was rolling viciously, and as
soon as he had got a few upright half of them collapsed again.  Wyllard
glanced towards them compassionately.

"I believe most of them have had nothing to eat since they came on
board, though it isn't the company's fault," he said.  "There's food
enough served out, but before we picked the breeze up the men laid
hands upon it first and half of it was wasted in the scramble.  Then it
seems they pitched these youngsters out of their berths."

"Don't they belong to anybody?" Agatha asked.  "Is there no one to look
after them?"

Wyllard smiled drily.  "I believe one of your charitable institutions
is sending them out, and there seems to be a clergyman, who has a
curate and a lay assistant to help him, in charge.  The assistant won't
be available while this rolling lasts, and the other two very naturally
prefer the saloon.  In a way, that's comprehensible."

He left her, and proceeded to help the man who was dragging the urchins
to their feet.

"Get up!" said the sergeant.  "Get up, and fall in.  Dress from the
left, and number off, the ones who can stand."

It appeared that the lads had been drilled, for they scrambled into a
line that bent and wavered each time the _Scarrowmania's_ bows went
down.  After that, every other lad stepped forward at the word; the
order was, "Left turn!  March, and fall in on deck," and when they
feebly clambered up the ladder Wyllard, who turned to Agatha, pointed
to a door in a bulkhead of rough white wood.

"It should have been locked, but I fancy you can get in that way, and
up through another hatch," he said.  "The single women, and women with
children are in yonder, and if you want to be useful there's a field
for you.  Get as many as possible up on deck."

Agatha left him, and her face was rather white when at last she came up
into the open air, with about a dozen forlorn, draggled women trailing
helplessly after her.  The lads were now sitting down in a double line
on deck, each with a tin plate and a steaming pannikin in front of him.
There were, she fancied, at least a hundred of them, and a man with a
bronzed face and the stamp of command upon him was giving them the
order of the voyage.  He was the one she had already noticed.

"You'll turn out at the whistle at half-past six," he said.  "Shake
mattresses, roll up blankets, and prepare for berth inspection.  Then,
at the next whistle, you'll fall in on deck stripped to the waist for
washing parade.  Fourth files numbering even are orderlies in charge of
the plates and pannikins."

"And," said the sergeant, "any insubordination will be sharply dealt
with.  Now, when I was with Roberts in Afghanistan----"

Wyllard, who was standing close by, turned to Agatha.

"I don't think we'll be wanted.  You have probably earned your
breakfast."

They went back to the saloon deck, and the girl smiled when he looked
at her inquiringly.

"It was a little horrible, but I hadn't so many to deal with," she
said.  "Do you, and those others expect to bring any order out of that
chaos?"

"No," said Wyllard, "with a little encouragement they'll do it
themselves--that is, the English, Danes, and Germans.  One can trust
them to evolve a workable system.  It's in their nature.  You can trace
most things that tend to wholesome efficiency back to the old Teutonic
leaven.  By and bye, they'll proceed to put some pressure on the
Latins, Slavs, and Jews."

"But is it your business to offer them that encouragement?"

Wyllard laughed.  "Strictly speaking, it isn't in the least, but
unnecessary chaos is rather hateful, and, any way, I'm not the only one
who doesn't seem to like it.  There's the petty officer, and our
friend, the sergeant, who was with Roberts in Afghanistan."

Agatha said nothing further.  She was a little surprised to feel that
she was anxious to keep this man's good opinion, though that was not
exactly why she had nerved herself for the venture into the single
women's quarters.  Leaving him out altogether, it seemed to her that
there was something rather fine in the way the petty officer who was
going out almost penniless to Canada, and the sergeant, had saddled
themselves with the task of looking after those helpless lads.  It was
wholly unpaid labour, for which the men who preferred to remain within
the safe limits of the saloon deck would presumably get the credit.
After all, she decided there were, no doubt, men in every station who
helped to keep the world sweet and clean, and she fancied that her
companion was to be counted among them.  He certainly differed in many
ways from Gregory, but then Gregory was unapproachable.  She did not
remember that it was four years since she had seen the latter, and that
her ideas had been a little unformed then.

During the evening, Mrs. Hastings, with whom he was evidently a
favourite, happened to speak of Wyllard, and the efforts he was making
in the steerage, and Agatha asked a question.

"Does he often undertake this kind of thing?"

"No," said Mrs. Hastings with a smile.  "Any way, not on so large a
scale.  He's very far from setting up as a professional philanthropist,
my dear.  I don't ever remember him offering to point out their duty to
other folks, and I don't think he goes about in search of an
opportunity of benefiting humanity.  Still, as I suggested, when an
individual case thrusts itself beneath his nose, he generally--does
what he can."

"I've heard people say that the individual method only perpetuates the
trouble," said Agatha.

Her companion laughed.  "That," she said, "is a subject I'm not well
posted on, but it seems to me that if other folks only adopted Harry
Wyllard's simple plan, there would be considerably less need for
organised charity."




CHAPTER IX.

THE FOG.

During the next two days the _Scarrowmania_ shouldered her way
westwards through the big, white-topped combers that rolled down upon
her under a lowering sky before a moderate gale.  There were no
luxurious, steam-propelled hotels in the Canadian trade just then, and,
loaded deep with railway metal as she was, she slopped the green seas
in everywhere, and rolled her streaming sides out almost to her bilge.
She also shivered and rattled horribly when her single screw swung
clear and the tri-compound engines ran away.

Wyllard went down to the steerage every now and then, and Agatha, who
contrived to keep on her feet, not infrequently accompanied him.  She
was glad of his society, for Mrs. Hastings was seldom in evidence, and
no efforts could get Miss Rawlinson out of her berth.  The gale,
however, blew itself out at length, and the evening after it moderated
Agatha was sitting near the head of one fiddle-guarded table in the
saloon waiting for dinner, which the stewards had still some difficulty
in bringing in.  Wyllard's place was next to hers, but he had not
appeared yet, nor, as it happened, had the skipper, who, however, did
not invariably dine with the passengers.  One of the two doors which
led from the foot of the branching companion stairway into either side
of the saloon stood open, and presently she saw Wyllard standing just
outside it.

He beckoned to the doctor, who sat at the foot of her table, and the
latter merely raised his brows a trifle.  He was a rather consequential
person, and it was evident to the girl that he resented being summoned
by a gesture.  She did not think anybody else had noticed Wyllard, and
she waited with some curiosity to see what he would do.  He made a sign
with a lifted hand, and she felt that the other would obey it, as, in
fact, he did, though his manner was very far from conciliatory.  By
dint of listening closely, she could hear their conversation.

"I'm sorry," said Wyllard, "to trouble you just now, and I didn't come
in because that would have set everybody wondering what you were wanted
for; but one of those boys forward has been thrown down the ladder, and
has cut his head."

"Ah!" said the doctor.  "I'll see to him--after dinner."

"It's a nasty cut," said Wyllard.  "He's losing a good deal of blood."

"Then I would suggest that you apply to my assistant."

"As I don't know where he is, I have come to you."

The doctor made a sign of impatience.  "Well," he said, "you have told
me, which I think is as far as your concern in the matter goes.  I may
add that I'm not accustomed to dictation on behalf of a steerage
passenger."

Agatha saw Wyllard quietly slip between him and the entrance to the
saloon, but she also saw, as neither of the others apparently did, the
skipper appear a few paces behind them, and glance at them sharply.  He
was usually a silent man, at home in the ice and the clammy fog, but
not a great acquisition in the saloon.

"Something wrong down forward, Mr. Wyllard?  They were making a great
row a little while ago," he said.

"Nothing very serious," said Wyllard.  "One of the boys, however, has
cut his head."

The skipper turned towards the doctor quietly; but Agatha fancied he
had overheard part of the conversation.

"Don't you think you had better go--at once?" he said.

The doctor evidently did, for he disappeared, and Wyllard, who entered
the saloon with the skipper, sat down at Agatha's side.

"How do you do it?" she asked.

"What?" asked Wyllard, attacking his dinner.

"We'll say persuade other folks to see things as you do."

"You evidently mean the skipper, and I suppose you heard something of
what was going on.  In this case, as it happens, I'm indebted to his
prejudices.  He's one of the old type--a seaman first of all--and what
we call bluff, and you call bounce, has only one effect upon men of his
kind.  It gets their backs up."

Agatha fancied that he did not like it, either, but she changed the
subject.

"There really was a row forward," she said.  "What was the trouble
over?  You were, no doubt, somewhere near the scene of it."

Wyllard laughed.  "I sat upon the steerage ladder, and am afraid I
cheered the combatants on.  It was really a glorious row.  They
hammered each other with tin plates, and some of them tried to use
hoop-iron knives, which fortunately doubled up.  They broke quite a few
of the benches, and wrecked the mess table, but so far as I noticed the
only one seriously hurt was a little chap who was quietly looking on."

"And you encouraged them?"

"I certainly did.  It was a protest against dirt, disorder, and the
slothfulness that's a plague to the community.  Isn't physical force
warranted when there's no other remedy?"

A grey-haired Canadian looked up.  "Yes," he said, "I guess it is.  The
first man who pulled his gun in British Columbia was hanged right away,
and they've scarcely had to make an example of another ever since,
though it's quite a while ago."

He paused, and smiled approvingly.  "A mess of any kind worries us, and
we don't take long to straighten it out.  Same feelings in the Germans
and Scandinavians.  I'll say that for them, any way.  Your friends
swept up the steerage?"

"They took the Slavs and Jews, and pitched them down the second hatch
on to the orlop deck.  Things will go smoothly now our crowd are on
top."

"Your crowd?" said Agatha.

The Canadian nodded.  "That's what he meant," he said.  "There are two
kinds of folks you and the rest of them are dumping into Canada.  One's
the kind that will get up and hustle, break land, and build new
homes--log at first, frame and stone afterwards.  They go on from a
quarter-section and a team of oxen to the biggest farm they can handle,
and every fresh furrow they cut enriches all of us.  The other kind
want to sit down in the dirt and take life easily, as they've always
done.  The dirt worries everybody else, and we've no use for them.  By
and bye our Legislature will have to wake up and stop them getting in."

He went on with his dinner after this, but his observations left Agatha
thoughtful.  She was, for one thing, beginning to understand one side
of her companion's character.  He, it seemed, stood for practical
efficiency.  There was a driving force in him that made for progress
and order.  It was apparently his mission to straighten things out.
Some folks of his kind, she reflected, now and then made a good deal of
avoidable trouble; but there was in this man, at least, a
half-whimsical toleration, which rendered that an unlikely thing in his
particular case.  Besides, she had already recognised that she was in
some respects fortunate in having such a man for her companion.

Her deck chair was always set out in the most sheltered and comfortable
place.  If there was anything to be seen, a cargo boat plunging along
forecastle under, or a great iron sailing ship thrashing out to the
westwards, with the spray clouds flying about her hove up weather side,
he almost invariably appeared with a pair of powerful glasses.  She was
watched over, her wishes anticipated, and the man was seldom
obtrusively present when she felt disposed to talk to somebody else.
It struck her that she had thought a good deal about him during the
last few days, and rather less than usual about Gregory, which was
partly why she did not walk up and down the deck with him, as usual,
after dinner that evening.

Three or four days later the _Scarrowmania_ ran into the Bank fog, and
burrowed through it with whistle hooting dolefully at regular
intervals.  Now and then an answering ringing of bells came out of the
clammy vapour, and the half-seen shape of an anchored schooner loomed
up, rolling wildly on grey slopes of sea.  Once, too, a tiny dory, half
filled with lines and buoys, slid by plunging on the wash flung off by
the _Scarrowmania's_ bows, and Agatha understood that the men in her
had escaped death by a hairsbreadth.  They were cod fishers, Wyllard
told her, and he added that there was a host of them at work somewhere
in the sliding haze.  She, however, fancied, now and then, that the fog
had a depressing effect on him, and that when the dory lay beneath the
rail there had been a somewhat unusual look in his face.

Then a breeze came out of the north-west, with the sting of the ice in
it, but the fog did not lift, and the _Scarrowmania_ plunged on through
it with spray-wet decks and the grey seas smashing about her bows.  It
was bitterly cold and clammy, the raw wind pierced to the bone, but the
voyage was, at least, rapidly shortening, and one evening Agatha paced
the deck with Wyllard in a somewhat curious mood.  Perhaps it was
merely the gloom re-acting upon her, for she was looking forward to the
landing with a certain half-conscious shrinking.

They stopped by the rails presently, looking out upon the tumbling seas
that rolled out of the sliding haze tipped with livid froth, and the
dreariness of the surroundings intensified the girl's depression.
There was something unpleasantly suggestive in the sight of the fog
that hid everything, for she had of late been troubled with a
half-apprehensive longing to see what lay before her.  In the
meanwhile, she noticed the look-out standing, a lonely, shapeless
figure, amidst the spray that whirled about the plunging bows.  By and
bye she saw him turn and wave an arm apparently towards the bridge
behind her, and she heard a hoarse, wind-out cry.  What it meant she
could not tell, but in another moment the _Scarrowmania's_ whistle
shrieked again.

Then a grey shape burst out of the vapour, and grew with astonishing
swiftness into dim tiers of slanted sailcloth swaying above a strip of
hull that moved amidst a broad white smear of foam.  It was a brig
under fore-course and topsails, and as Agatha watched her she sank to
her tilted bowsprit, and a big grey and white sea foamed about her bows.

"Aren't we dreadfully near?" she asked.

Wyllard did not answer.  He was gazing up at the bridge, and once more
the whistle hurled out a great warning blast.  It hardly seemed to her
that the two vessels could pass clear of each other.  Then Wyllard laid
a hand upon her shoulder.

"The skipper's starboarding.  We'll go round her stern," he said.

His grasp was reassuring, and she watched the straining curves of
canvas and line of half-submerged hull.  It rose with streaming bows,
swung high above the sea, sank again, and vanished with bewildering
suddenness into a belt of driving fog.  She was not sure that there had
been any peril, but it was certainly over now, and she was rather
puzzled by her sensations when Wyllard had held her shoulder.  For one
thing, she had felt instinctively that she was safe with him.  She,
however, decided not to trouble herself about the reason for this, and
by and bye she looked up at him.  The expression she had already
noticed was once more in his face.

"I don't think you like the fog any more than I do," she said.

"No," said Wyllard, with a quiet forcefulness that almost startled her.
"I hate it."

"Why do you go as far as that?"

"It recalls something that still gives me a very bad few minutes every
now and then.  It has been worrying me again to-night."

"I wonder," said Agatha simply, "if you would care to tell me?"

The man looked down on her with a little wry smile.  "I haven't told it
often, but you shall hear," he said.  "It's a tale of a black failure."
He stretched out a hand and pointed to the sliding fog and ranks of
tumbling seas.  "It was very much this kind of night, and we were
lying, reefed down, off one of the Russians' beaches, when I asked for
volunteers.  I got them--two boats' crews of the finest seamen that
ever handled oar or sealing rifle."

"But what did you want them for?"

"A boat from another schooner had been cast ashore.  It was blowing
tolerably hard, as it usually does where the Polar ice comes down into
the Behring Sea.  They'd been shooting seals from her.  We meant to
bring the men off if we could manage it."

"Wouldn't one boat have been enough?"

"No," said Wyllard drily, "we had three, and I think that was one cause
of the trouble.  There was one from the other schooner.  You see, those
seals belonged to the Russians, and we free-lances could only shoot
them clear off shore.  I'm not sure that the men in the wrecked boat
had been fishing outside the limit."

Agatha did not press for further particulars, and he went on:

"We managed to make a landing, though one boat went up bottom
uppermost," he said.  "I fancy they must have broken or lost an oar
then.  We also got the wrecked men, but we had trouble while we were
getting the boats off again.  The surf was running in savagely, and the
fog shut down solid as a wall.  Any way, we pulled off, and went out
with a foot of water in us, while one of the rescued men took my oar
when I let it go."

"Why had you to let it go?"

Wyllard laughed in a rather grim fashion.

"I got my head laid open with a sealing club," he said.  "Some of the
rest had their scratches, but they managed to row.  For one thing, they
knew they had to.  They had reasons for not wanting to fall into the
Russians' hands.  Well, we cleared the beach, and once or twice as I
tried to bale there was a shout somewhere near us, and the loom of a
vanishing boat.  It was all we could make out, for the sea was slopping
into her, and the spray was flying everywhere.  If there had only been
two boats we'd probably have found out our misfortune, and perhaps have
set it straight.  As it was, we couldn't tell it was the same boat that
had hailed us."

He broke off for a moment, and then added quietly, "Two boats reached
the schooners.  There was a nasty sea running then, and it blew
viciously hard next day.  There were three men in the other."

"Ah," said Agatha, "they were drowned?"

Wyllard made a little forceful gesture.  "I'm not quite sure.  That's
the trouble.  At least, the boat was nowhere on the beach next day, and
it's difficult to see how they could have faced the sea that piled up
when the gale came down.  In all probability, they had an oar short,
and she rolled them out when a comber broke upon her in the darkness."
The girl saw him close one hand tight as he added, "If one only knew!"

"What would have befallen them if they'd got ashore?"

"It's difficult to say.  In a general way, they'd have been handed over
to the Russian authorities.  Still, sealers poaching up there have
simply disappeared."

He stopped again, and glanced out at the gathering darkness.  "Now," he
added, "you see why I hate the fog."

"But you couldn't help it," said Agatha.

"Well," said Wyllard, "I asked for volunteers, and the money that's now
mine came out of those schooners.  It's just possible those men are
living still--somewhere in Northern Asia.  I only know they
disappeared."

Then he abruptly commenced to talk of something else, and by and bye
Agatha went down to the saloon, where Miss Rawlinson, who had not been
much in evidence during the voyage, presently made her appearance.

"Aren't you going into the music-room to play for Mr. Wyllard--as
usual?" she said.

Agatha was almost disconcerted.  She had fallen into the habit of
spending half an hour or longer in the little music-room every evening,
with Wyllard standing near the piano; but now her companion's question
seemed to place a significance upon the fact.

"No," she said, "I don't think I am."

"Then the rest of them will wonder it you have fallen out with him."

"Fallen out with him?"

Winifred laughed.  "They've naturally been watching both of you, and,
in a general way, there's only one decision they could have arrived at."

Agatha flushed a little, but her companion went on:

"I don't mind admitting that if a man of that kind was to fall in love
with me, I'd black his boots for him," she said.  Then she added, with
a whimsically rueful gesture, "Still, it's most unlikely."

Agatha looked at her with a little glint in her eyes.

"He is merely Gregory's deputy," she said, with a sub-conscious feeling
that the epithet was not a remarkably fortunate one.  "In that
connection, I should like to point out that you can estimate a man's
character by that of his friends."

"Oh," said Winifred, "then if Mr. Wyllard's strong points are merely to
heighten Gregory's credit, I've nothing more to say.  Anyway, I'll
reserve my homage until I've seen him.  Perfection among men is scarce
nowadays."

She turned away, and left Agatha thoughtful.  In the meanwhile, Mrs.
Hastings came upon Wyllard in the music-room.  There was just then
nobody else in it.

"You look quite serious," she said.

"I've been thinking about Miss Ismay and Gregory," said Wyllard.  "In
fact, I feel a little anxious about them."

"In which way?"

"Without making any reflections upon Gregory, I somehow feel sorry for
the girl."

Mrs. Hastings nodded.  "As a matter of fact, that's very much what I
felt from the first," she said.  "Still, you see, there's the important
fact that she's fond of him, and it should smooth out a good many
difficulties.  Anyway, what we can call the material ones won't count.
She's evidently rather a courageous person."

The man sat silent a moment or two.  "I wasn't troubling about them,"
he said.  "I was wondering if she really could be fond of him.  It's
some years since she was much in his company."

"Hawtrey is not a man to change."

"That," said Wyllard, "is just the trouble.  I've no doubt he's much
the same, but one could fancy that Miss Ismay has changed a good deal
since she last saw him.  She'll look for considerably more than she was
probably content with then."

"In any case, it isn't your affair."

"In one sense it certainly isn't; but I can't help feeling a little
troubled about the thing.  You see, Gregory is quite an old friend."

"And the girl is going out to marry him," said Mrs. Hastings.

Wyllard rose.  "That," he said, "is quite uncalled for.  I would like
to assure you of it."

He went out, and the lady sat still in a reflective mood.

"If she begins to compare him with Hawtrey, there can be only one
result," she said.

The fog had almost gone next morning, and pale sunshine streamed down
upon a froth-flecked sea.  A bitter wind, however, still came out of
the hazy north, and the _Scarrowmania's_ plates were crusted with ice
where the highest crests of the tumbling seas reached them.  The spray
also froze, and the decks grew slippery, until when darkness came
nobody but the seamen faced the stinging cold.  Agatha felt the engines
stop late that night, and when she went out next morning the decks were
white, and she could see dim ghosts of sliding pines through a haze of
falling snow.  It grew bewilderingly thick at times, but the steamer
slid on through it with whistle hooting, and when at last towards
sunset the snow cleared away Agatha stood shivering under a deck-house,
looking about her with a curiously heavy heart.

A grey haze stretched across the great river, which was also dim and
grey, and odd wisps of pines rose raggedly beneath the white hills that
cut against a gloomy, lowering sky.  Deck-house, boat, and stanchion
dripped, and every now and then the silence was broken by a doleful
blast of the whistle.  Nothing moved on the still, grey water; there
was no sign of life ashore; and they seemed to be steaming into a great
desolation.

By and bye, Wyllard appeared from somewhere, and after a glance at her
face slipped his hand beneath her arm, and led her down to the lighted
saloon.  Then her heart grew a little lighter.  Once more she was
conscious of an unreasoning feeling that she was safe with him.




CHAPTER X.

DISILLUSION.

The long train was speeding smoothly across the vast white levels of
Assiniboia, when Agatha, who sat by a window, looked up as the
conductor strode through the car.  Mrs. Hastings asked him a question,
and he stopped a moment.

"Yes," he said, "we'll be in Clermont inside half an hour."

Then he went on, and Mrs. Hastings smiled at Agatha.

"We're a little late, and Gregory will be waiting for us in the depôt
now," she said.  "No doubt he's got the waggon fixed up right, but I'd
like to feel sure of it.  There's a long drive before us, and I want to
reach the homestead before it's dark."

Agatha said nothing, but a faint tinge of colour crept into her cheeks,
and her companion was glad to see it, for she had noticed that the girl
was looking rather pale and haggard.  This was partly due to the fact
that the strain of the last few months she had spent in England was
commencing to tell on her.  She had borne it courageously, but a
reaction had afterwards set in, and, as it happened, the _Scarrowmania_
had plunged along bows under against fresh north-westerly gales most of
the way across the Atlantic.  There is very little comfort on board a
small, deeply-loaded steamer when she rolls her rails in, and lurches
with thudding screw swung clear over big, steep-sided combers.  In
addition to this, Agatha had scarcely slept during the few days and
nights she had spent in the train.  It takes some time to become
accustomed to the atmosphere of a stove-heated sleeper car, and since
she had landed she had been in a state of not altogether unnatural
nervous tension.

Indeed, she had found it a little difficult to preserve an outward
serenity the previous day, and when at length the great train ran into
the depôt at Winnipeg, where Gregory had arranged to meet them, it was
with a thrill of expectancy and relief that she stood upon the car
platform.  There was, however, no sign of him, and though Wyllard
handed her a telegram from him a few minutes later the fact that he had
not arrived had a depressing effect on her.  Quiet as she usually was,
the girl was highly strung.  It appeared that something had gone wrong
with Hawtrey's waggon while he was driving in to the railroad, and as
the result of it he had missed the Atlantic train.  She could not blame
him for this, but for all that his absence had been an unpleasant shock.

Feeling that her companion's eyes were upon her, she turned, and
looking out of the window found no encouragement in what she saw.  The
snow had gone, and a vast expanse of grass ran back to the horizon; but
it was a dingy, greyish-white, and not green as it had been in England.
The sky was low and grey, too, and the only thing that broke the dreary
monotony of lifeless colour was when the formless, darker smear of a
birch bluff rose out of the empty levels.  Her heart throbbed
unpleasantly fast as the few remaining minutes slipped away, and at
length she started when a dingy mass of something that looked like
buildings lifted itself above the prairie.

"The Clermont elevators," said Mrs. Hastings.  "We'll be in directly."

The mass separated itself into two or three tall component blocks.  A
huddle of little wooden houses grew into shape beneath them, and a
shrill whistle came ringing back above the slowing cars.  Then a willow
bluff, half filled with old cans and garbage, flitted by, a big bell
commenced tolling, and Agatha rose when Mrs. Hastings took up her furs
from a seat close by.  After that, she found herself standing on the
platform of the car, though she did not quite know how she got there,
for she was sensible only of the fact that in another moment or two she
would greet the lover she had last seen four years ago.

In the meanwhile, though she paid them no great attention, the
surroundings had a depressing effect on her.  There was, however, very
little to see; the mass of the great elevators that cut against a
lowering sky, the little cluster of houses, and the sea of churned-up
mire between them and the track.  There also appeared to be no station
except a big water tank and a rather unsightly shed, about which stood
a group of blurred and shapeless figures.  It seemed very cold, and
Agatha shivered as she felt the raw wind strike through her.

Then one of the figures detached itself from the rest and grew clearer.
The man wore an old skin coat spattered with flakes of mire, and his
long boots were covered with clots of the same material.  His fur cap
looked greasy, and the fur had been rubbed off it in patches; but while
she noticed these things it was his face that struck her most, and she
became conscious of an astonishment which was mixed with vague
misgivings as she gazed at it, for it had subtly changed since she had
last seen it.  The joyous sparkle she remembered had gone out of the
eyes.  They were harder, bolder, than they used to be.  The mouth was
slack--it almost looked sensual--and the man's whole personality seemed
to have grown coarser.  Then as she thrust the disconcerting fancies
from her the car stopped.

In another moment Hawtrey sprang up on the platform, and she felt his
arms about her.  That brought the blood to her face, but she felt none
of the thrill she had expected.  Indeed, she was subconsciously
sensible of a certain shrinking from his embrace.  Then, and she
fancied he must have lifted her bodily down, she stood beside the track
with Mrs. Hastings, a man whom she supposed to be the latter's husband,
Winifred, and Wyllard about her.  Another man was also standing close
by, apparently waiting until they noticed him.  He was flecked with
mire all over, his skin coat was very dilapidated, and Agatha fancied
that his boots had never been cleaned.  His hair, which had evidently
been very badly cut, straggled out from under his old fur cap.

[Illustration: "In another moment Hawtrey sprang up on the platform,
and she felt his arms about her."]

In the meanwhile, Gregory was apparently explaining something to Mrs.
Hastings.  "No," he said, "I'm sorry it can't be for another week.
Horribly unfortunate.  It seems they've sent the Methodist on down the
line, and we'll have to wait for the Episcopalian.  He'll be at
Lander's for a few days."

Then Agatha's cheeks flamed, for she recognised that it was her wedding
they were speaking of; but it brought her a curious relief to hear that
it had been deferred.  A moment or two later Gregory turned to her with
questions about her throat, and his people in England, and Winifred
separated herself from the group.  She was standing near her baggage,
which had been flung out beside the track, a little, lonely figure,
while the train went on, when Wyllard strode up to her.

"Feeling rather out of it?  I do, any way," he said.  "Since we appear
superfluous, we may as well make the most of the opportunity,
especially as it will probably save you a long drive.  There's a man
here who wants to see you."

Winifred had felt very forlorn a few moments earlier, but the
announcement Wyllard had just made was reassuring, and she pulled
herself together as he signed to a man standing a little further along
the track.  The latter wore rather neat store clothes, and his manner
was brisk and wholly business-like.  It was a certain relief to the
girl to see that he evidently regarded her less as a personality than
as a piece of commercial machinery, which he had apparently been asked
to make use of.  She had found it easier to get on with men who
confined themselves to that point of view.

"Mr. Hamilton, in charge of the elevator yonder," said Wyllard,
pointing to one of the huge buildings.  "This is Miss Rawlinson."

The elevator man made her the curtest of inclinations, and proceeded to
arrange matters with a rapidity which almost took her breath away.

"Typist and stenographer?" he said.  "Know anything about
account-keeping?"

Winifred admitted that she possessed these abilities, and Hamilton
appeared to reflect for a moment or two.

"Well," he said, "in a fortnight we'll give you a show.  You can start
at--" and he mentioned terms which rather astonished Winifred.  "If you
can keep things straight we may raise you later."

"Won't you want to see any testimonials?" she asked.

"No," said Hamilton.  "I've seen a good many, and I'm inclined to fancy
some of the folks who showed them me must have bought them."  He waved
his hand.  "Mr. Wyllard assures me that you'll do, and in the meanwhile
that's quite enough for me."

It struck Winifred as curious that, while Agatha had written to Hawtrey
on her behalf, it was Wyllard who had secured her the opportunity she
had longed for; but she thanked the elevator man before she turned to
him.

"There's another matter," she said hesitatingly.  "I'll have to live
here?"

Wyllard smiled.  "I've seen to that, though if you don't like my
arrangements you can alter them afterwards.  Mrs. Sandberg will take
you in, and even if she isn't particularly amiable you'll be in safe
hands."

Hamilton laughed.  "Oh, yes," he said.  "She's Scotch--old type
Calvinist at that.  No frivolity about that woman.  Married a
Scandinavian, and was just breaking him in when he was killed back East
along the track."

"We'll consider it as fixed, but in the meanwhile you're to stay with
Mrs. Hastings for the fortnight," said Wyllard.  "Sproatly"--and he
signed to the man in the skin coat--"will you get Miss Rawlinson's
baggage into your waggon?"

The man took off his fur cap.  "If Miss Rawlinson would like to see
Mrs. Sandberg, I'll drive her round," he suggested.  "We'll catch you
up in a league or so.  Gregory has a bit of patching to do on his
off-side trace."

"He might have had things straight for once," said Wyllard half-aloud.

Winifred permitted Sproatly to help her into his waggon--a high,
narrow-bodied vehicle, mounted on tall, spidery wheels, but she had to
hold fast to it while they jolted across the track and through a sea of
mire into the unpaved street of the little town.  She liked her
companion's voice and manner, though she was far from prepossessed by
his appearance.  Two or three minutes later he drew up before a little
wooden house, where they were received by a tall, hard-faced woman, who
frowned at Sproatly.

"Ye'll tak' your patent medicines somewhere else.  I'm wanting none,"
she said.

Sproatly grinned.  "You needn't be afraid of them.  They couldn't hurt
you.  I was talking to a Winnipeg doctor who'd a notion of coming out a
day or two ago.  I told him if he did he'd have to bring an axe along."

Then he explained that Wyllard had sent Winifred there, and the woman
favoured her with a glance of careful scrutiny.

"Weel," she said, "ye look quiet, anyway."  Then she added, as though
further satisfied, "I'll make ye a cup of tea if ye can wait."

Sproatly assured her that this was not the case, and in a few more
minutes the girl, who went into the house, got into the waggon again,
with relief in her face.

"I think I owe Mr. Wyllard a good deal," she said.

Sproatly laughed.  "You're not exactly singular in that respect, but
you had better hold tight.  These beasts are rather less than half
broken."

He flicked them with the whip, and they went across the track at a
gallop, hurling great clods of mud left and right, while the group of
loungers who still stood about the station raised a shout.

"Got any little pictures with nice motters on them?" asked one, and
another flung a piece of information after the jolting waggon.

"There's a Swede down at Branker's wants a bottle that will supple up a
wooden leg," he said.

Sproatly grinned, and waved his hand to them before he turned to his
companion.

"We have to get through before dark, if possible, or I'd stop and sell
them something sure," he said.  "Parts of the trail further on are
simply horrible."

It occurred to Winifred that it was far from excellent as it was, for
spouts of mud flew up beneath the sinking hoofs and wheels, and she was
already getting unpleasantly spattered.

"You think you would have succeeded?" she asked.

"Oh, yes," said Sproatly.  "If I couldn't plant something on to them
when they'd given me a lead like that, I'd be no use in this business.
At present, my command of Western phraseology is my fortune."

"You sell things, then?"

Sproatly pointed to a couple of big boxes in the bottom of the waggon.
"Anything from cough cure to hair restorer, besides a general purpose
elixir that's specially prepared for me.  It's adaptable to any
complaint and season.  All you have to do"--and he lowered his voice
confidentially--"is to put on a different label."

Winifred, who had not felt like it a little earlier, laughed when she
met his eyes.

"What happens to the people who buy it?" she asked.

"Most of them are bachelors, and tough.  They've stood their own
cooking so long that they ought to be, and if anybody's really sick I
hold off and tell him to wait until he can get a doctor.  A sensitive
conscience," he added reflectively, "is quite a handicap in this
business."

"You have always been in it?" asked Winifred, who was amused at him.

"No," said Sproatly, "although you mightn't believe it, I was raised
with the idea that I should have my choice between the Church and the
Bar.  The idea, however, proved--impracticable--which, in some
respects, is rather a pity.  It has seemed to me that a man who can
work off cough cures and cosmetics on to healthy folks with a hide like
leather, and talk a scoffer off the field, ought to have made his mark
in either calling."

He looked at her as if for confirmation of this view, but Winifred, who
laughed again, glanced at the two waggons that moved on, perhaps, two
miles away across the grey-white sweep of prairie.

"Will we overtake them?" she asked.

"We'll probably come up with Gregory.  I'm not sure about Wyllard."

"He drives faster horses?"

"That's not quite the reason.  Gregory has patched up one trace with a
bit of string, and odd bolts are rather addicted to coming out of his
waggon.  Sometimes it makes trouble.  I've known the team leave him
sitting on the prairie, thinking of endearing names for them, and come
home with the pole."

"Does he generally let things fall into that state?"

Sproatly, however, was evidently on his guard.

"Well," he said, "it's certainly that kind of waggon."

Then he flicked the team again, and the jolting rendered it difficult
for Winifred to ask any more questions.  The prairie sod was soft with
the thaw, and big lumps of it stuck to the wheels, which every now and
then plunged into ruts other vehicles had made.

In the meanwhile, Agatha and Hawtrey found it almost as impossible to
sustain a conversation, which was, on the whole, a relief to the girl.
The string-patched trace still held, and the waggon pole was a new one,
but where they were just then the white grass was tussocky and long,
and the trail they occasionally plunged into to avoid it had been
churned into a quagmire.  Hawtrey had packed the thick driving robe
high about his companion, and slipped one arm about her waist beneath
it; but she was conscious that she rather suffered this than derived
any satisfaction from it.  She strove to assure herself that she was
jaded with the journey, which was, in fact, the case, and that the
lowering sky, and the cheerless waste they were crossing, had
occasioned the dejection she felt, which was also possible.  There was
not a tree upon the vast sweep of bleached grass which ran all round
her to the horizon.  It was inexpressibly lonely, a lifeless
desolation, with only the ploughed-up trail to show that man had ever
traversed it; and the raw wind which swept it set her shivering.

She was, however, forced to admit that her weariness and the dreary
surroundings did not quite explain everything.  Even her lover's first
embrace had brought her no thrill, and now the close pressure of his
arm left her quite unmoved.  This was almost disconcertingly curious;
but while she would admit no definite reason for it, there was creeping
upon her a vague consciousness that the man was not the one she had so
often thought of in England.  He seemed different--almost, in fact, a
stranger--though she could not exactly tell where the change in him
began.  His laughter jarred upon her.  Some of the things he said
appeared almost inane, and others were tinged with a self-confidence
that did not become him.  It almost seemed to her that he was shallow,
lacking in comprehension, and once she found herself comparing him with
another man.  She, however, broke off that train of thought abruptly,
and once more endeavoured to find the explanation in herself.
Weariness had induced this captious, hypercritical fit, and by and bye
she would become used to him, she said.

Hawtrey was, at least, not effusive, for which she was thankful, but
when they reached a somewhat smoother surface he commenced to talk of
England.

"I suppose you saw a good deal of my folks when you were at the
Grange?" he said.

"No," said Agatha, "I saw them once or twice."

"Ah!" said the man, with a trace of sharpness, "then they were not
particularly agreeable?"

It seemed to Agatha that he was tactless in suggesting anything of the
kind, but she answered candidly.

"One could hardly go quite so far as that," she said.  "Still, I
couldn't help a feeling that it was rather an effort for them to be
gracious to me."

"They did what they could to make things pleasant when they were first
told of our engagement."

Agatha was too worn-out to be altogether on her guard, which was partly
why she had admitted as much as she had done, though his relatives'
attitude had wounded her, and she answered without reflection.

"I have fancied that was because they never quite believed it would
lead to anything."

She knew this was the truth now, though it was the first time the
explanation had occurred to her.  Gregory's folks, who were naturally
acquainted with his character, had, it seemed, not expected him to
carry his promise out.  She, however, felt that she had been
injudicious when she heard his little harsh laugh.

"I'm afraid they never had a very great opinion of me," he said.

"Then," said Agatha, looking up at him, "it will be our business to
prove them wrong; but I can't help feeling that you have undertaken a
big responsibility, Gregory.  There must be so much that I ought to do,
and I know so little about your work in this country."  She turned, and
glanced with a shiver at the dim, white prairie.  "It looks so
forbidding and unyielding.  It must be very hard to turn it into wheat
fields--to break it in."

It was merely a hint of what she felt, and it was rather a pity that
Hawtrey, who lacked imagination, usually contented himself with the
most obvious meaning of the spoken word.  Things might have gone
differently had he responded with comprehending sympathy.

"Oh," he said, with a laugh that changed her mood, "you'll learn, and I
don't suppose it will matter a great deal if you don't do it quickly.
Somehow or other one worries through."

She felt that this was insufficient, though she remembered that his
haphazard carelessness had once appealed to her.  Now, however, she
realised that to undertake a thing light-heartedly was a very different
matter from carrying it out successfully.  Then it once more occurred
to her that she was becoming absurdly hypercritical, and she strove to
talk of other things.

She did not find it easy, nor, though he made the effort, did Hawtrey.
There was a restraint that he chafed at upon him, for he had when he
first saw her been struck by the change in the girl.  She was graver
than he remembered her, and, it seemed, very much more reserved.  He
had tried and failed, as he thought of it, to strike a spark out of
her.  She did not respond, and he became uneasily conscious that he
could not talk to her as he could, for instance, to Sally Creighton.
There was something wanting in him or her, but he could not at the
moment tell what it was.  Still, he said, things would be different
next day, for the girl was evidently very weary.

In the meanwhile, the creeping dusk settled down upon the wilderness.
The horizon narrowed in, and the stretch of grass before them grew dim.
The trail they now drove into seemed to grow rapidly rougher, and it
was quite dark when they came to the brink of a declivity still at
least a league from the Hastings's homestead.  It was one of the steep
ravines that seam the prairie every here and there, with a birch bluff
on the sides of it, and a little creek flowing through the hollow.

Hawtrey swung the whip when they reached the top, and the team plunged
furiously down the slope.  He straightened himself in his seat with
both hands on the reins, and Agatha held her breath when she felt the
light vehicle tilt as the wheels on one side sank deep in a rut.  Then
something seemed to crack, and she saw the off-side horse stumble and
plunge.  The other beast flung its head up, Hawtrey shouted something,
and there was a great smashing and snapping of undergrowth and fallen
branches as they drove in among the birches.  Then the team stopped,
and Hawtrey, who sprang down, floundered noisily among the undergrowth,
while another thud of hoofs and rattle of wheels grew louder behind
them up the trail.  In a minute or two he came back and lifted Agatha
down.

[Illustration: "Then something seemed to crack, and she saw the
off-side horse stumble and plunge."]

"It's the trace broken.  I had to make the holes with my knife, and the
string's torn through," he said.  "Voltigeur got it round his feet,
and, as usual, tried to bolt.  Anyway, we'll make the others pull up
and take you in."

They went back to the trail together, and reached it just as Hastings
reined in his team.  He got down and walked back with Hawtrey to the
latter's waggon.  It was a minute or two before they reappeared again,
and Mrs. Hastings, who had got down in the meanwhile, drew Hawtrey
aside.

"I almost think it would be better if you didn't come any further
to-night," she said.

"Why?" the man asked sharply.

"I can't help thinking that Agatha would prefer it.  For one thing,
she's rather jaded, and wants quietness."

"You feel sure of that?"

There was something in the man's voice which suggested that he was not
quite satisfied, and his companion was silent a moment.

"It's good advice, Gregory," she said.  "She'll be better able to face
the situation after a night's rest."

"Does it require much facing?" Hawtrey asked drily.

Mrs. Hastings turned from him with a sign of impatience.  "Of course it
does.  Anyway, if you're wise you'll do what I suggest, and ask no more
questions."

Then she got into the waggon, and Hawtrey stood still beside the trail,
feeling unusually thoughtful when they drove away.




CHAPTER XI.

AGATHA'S DECISION.

It was with an expectancy which was slightly toned down by misgivings
that Hawtrey drove over to the homestead where Agatha was staying the
next afternoon.  The misgivings were, perhaps, not unnatural, for he
had been chilled by the girl's reception of him on the previous day,
and her manner afterwards had, he felt, left something to be desired.
Indeed, when she drove away with Mrs. Hastings he had felt himself a
somewhat injured man.

His efforts to mend the harness, and extricate the waggon in the dark,
which occupied him for an hour, had, however, partly helped to drive
the matter from his mind, and when he reached his homestead rather late
that night he went to sleep, and slept soundly until sunrise, which was
significant.  Hawtrey was, at least, a man who never brooded over his
troubles beforehand, and this was, perhaps, one reason why he did not
always cope with them successfully when they could no longer be avoided.

When he had made his breakfast he, however, became sensible of a
certain pique against both Mrs. Hastings and the girl, which led him to
remember that he had no hired man, and that there was a good deal to be
done.  He decided that it might be well to wait until the afternoon
before he called on them, and for several hours he drove his team
through the crackling stubble.  His doubts and irritation grew weaker
as he did so, and when at length he drove into sight of Hastings's
homestead, his buoyant temperament was commencing to reassert itself.
Clear sunshine streamed down upon the prairie out of a vault of
cloudless blue, and he felt that after all any faint shadow that might
have arisen between him and the girl could be readily swept away.

He was, however, a little less sure of this when he saw her.  Agatha
sat near an open window, in a scantily furnished match-boarded room,
and she, at least, as it happened, had not slept at all.  Her eyes were
heavy, but there was a look of resolution in them which seemed out of
place just then, and it struck him that she had lost the freshness
which had characterised her in England.

She rose when he came in, and then, to his astonishment, drew back a
pace or two when he moved impulsively towards her.

"No," she said, with a hand raised restrainingly, "you must hear what I
have to say, and try to bear with me.  It is a little difficult,
Gregory, but it must be said at once."

The man stood still, almost awkwardly, looking at her with
consternation in his face, and for a moment she looked steadily at him.
It was a painful moment, for she was just then gifted with a clearness
of vision which she almost longed to be delivered from.  She saw that
the impression which had brought her a vague sense of dismay on the
previous afternoon was wrong.  The trouble was that he had not changed
at all.  He was what he had always been, and she had merely deceived
herself when she had permitted her girlish fancy to endue him with
qualities and graces which he had, it seemed, never possessed.  There
was, however, no doubt that she had still a duty towards him.

He spoke first with a trace of hardness in his voice.

"Then," he said, "won't you sit down.  This is naturally a
little--embarrassing--but I'll try to listen."

Agatha sank into a seat by the open window, for she felt physically
worn-out, and there was a task she shrank from before her.

"Gregory," she said, "I feel that we have come near making what might
prove to be a horrible mistake."

"We?" said Hawtrey, while the blood rose into his weather-darkened
face.  "That means both of us."

"Yes," said Agatha, with a quietness that cost her an effort.

Hawtrey spread his hands out forcibly.  "Do you want me to admit that
I've made one?"

"Are you quite sure you haven't?"

She flung the question at him sharply in tense apprehension, for, after
all, if the man was sure of himself, there was only one course open to
her.  He leaned upon the table, gazing at her, and as he did so his
indignation melted, and doubts commenced to creep into his mind.

She looked weary, and grave, and almost haggard, and it was a fresh,
light-hearted girl he had fallen in love with in England.  The mark of
the last two years of struggle was just then plain on her, though,
while he did not recognise this, it would pass away again.  He tried to
realise what he had looked for when he had asked her to marry

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