The Land of Promise: A Comedy in Four Acts (1922)

From the parsonage they drove directly to the station.

CHAPTER XI

The journey had seemed endless: it was already nightfall when they arrived at the town of Prentice, where they were to get off and drive some twelve miles farther to her new home. And yet, endless and unspeakably wearying as it was, her heart contracted to find that it was at an end.

She realized now how comfortable, even luxurious, her trip across the Continent had been by comparison. Then, she had traveled in a Pullman. This, she learned, was called a day-coach. Her husband did everything in his power to mitigate the rigors of the trip. He made a pillow for her with his coat, bought her fruits, candies and magazines from the train-boy, until she protested. Best of all, he divined and respected her disinclination for conversation. At intervals during the day he left her to go into the smoking-car to enjoy his pipe.

The view from the window was, on the whole, rather monotonous. But it would have had to be varied indeed to match the mental pictures that Nora's flying thoughts conjured up for her.

The dead level of her life at Tunbridge Wells had been a curious preparation for the violent changes of the last few months. How often when walking in the old-world garden with Miss Wickham she had had the sensation of stifling, oppressed by those vine-covered walls, and inwardly had likened herself to a prisoner. There were no walls now to confine her. Clear away to the sunset it was open. And yet she was more of a prisoner than she had ever been. And now she wore a fetter, albeit of gold, on her hand.

It had been her habit to think of herself with pity as friendless in those days; forgetful of the good doctor and his wife, Agnes Pringle and even Mr. Wynne, not to speak of her humbler friends, the gardener's wife and children, and the good Kate. Well, she was being punished for it now. It would be hard, indeed, to imagine a more friendless condition than hers. Rushing onward, farther and farther into the wilderness to make for herself a home miles from any human habitation; no woman, in all probability, to turn to in case of need. And, crowning loneliness, having ever at her side a man with whom she had been on terms of open enmity up to a few short hours before!

From time to time she stole furtive glances at him as he sat at her side; and once, when he had put his head back against the seat and pulled his broad-brimmed hat over his eyes and was seemingly asleep, she turned her head and gave him a long appraising look.

How big and strong and self-reliant he was. He was just the type of man who would go out into the wilderness and conquer it. And, although she had scoffed at his statement when he made it, she knew that he had brains. Yes, although his lack of education and refinement must often touch her on the raw, he was a man whom any woman could respect in her heart.

And when they clashed, as clash they must until she had tamed him a little, she would need every weapon in her woman's arsenal to save her from utter route; she realized that. But then, these big, rough men were always the first to respond to any appeal to their natural chivalry. If she found herself being worsted, there was always that to fall back upon.

If from some other world Miss Wickham could see her, how she must be smiling! Nora, herself, smiled at the thought. And at the thought of Agnes Pringle's outraged astonishment if she were to meet her husband now, before she had toned him down, as she meant to do. She recalled the chill finality of her friend's tone when in animadverting on the doctor's unfortunate assistant she had said: "But, my dear, of course it would be impossible to marry anyone who wasn't a gentleman."

If by some Arabian Night's trick she could suddenly transport herself and the sleeping Frank to Miss Pringle's side, she felt that that excellent lady's astonishment at seeing her descend from the Magic Carpet would be as nothing in comparison to her astonishment in being presented to Nora's husband.

Her mind had grown accustomed already to thinking of him as her husband; not, as yet, to thinking of herself as his wife.

At supper time they went into a car ahead, where Frank ate with his accustomed appetite and Nora pecked daintily at the cold chicken.

And now they were at Prentice. For some minutes before arriving, Frank, who had asked her a few moments before to change places with him, had been looking anxiously out of the window, his nose flattened against the glass. As they drew up to the station platform, he gave a shout.

"Good! There's old man Sharp. Luckily I remembered it was the day he generally drove over and wired him."

"What for?"

"So that he could drive us home. He's a near neighbor; lives only about a mile beyond us. He's married, too. So you won't be entirely without a woman to complain to about me."

"I should hardly be likely to do that," said Nora stiffly.

"Bless your heart! I know you wouldn't: you're not that sort."

"I hope she's not much like Gertie."

"Gosh, no! A different breed of cats altogether."

"Well, that's something to be thankful for."

"This is Mr. Sharp; Sid, shake hands with Mrs. Frank Taylor."

It was the first time that she had heard herself called by her new name. It came as a distinct and not altogether pleasant shock.

Once again her husband lifted her in his strong arms to the back seat of the rough-looking wagon and saw to it that she was warmly wrapped up, for, although there was little or no snow to be seen at Prentice, the night air was sharply chill. She moved over a little to make room for him at her side; but without appearing to notice her action, he jumped lightly onto the front seat beside his friend.

"Let 'em go, Sid. Everything all comfortable?" he asked, turning to Nora.

"Quite, thanks."

Throughout the long cold drive, they exchanged no further word. Frank and Sid seemed to have much to say to each other about their respective farms. Nora gathered from what she could hear that Sharp had played the part of a good neighbor, during her husband's enforced absence, in having a general oversight of his house.

"You'll find the fence's down in quite a few places. I allowed to fix it myself when I had the spare time, but when I heard that you was comin' back so soon, I just naturally let her go."

"Sure, that was right. It'll give me something to do right at home. I don't want to leave Mrs. Taylor too much alone until she gets a little used to it. She's always been used to a lot of company," Nora heard him say.

She smiled to herself in the darkness and felt a little warm feeling of gratitude. She was right in her estimate. This man would be tractable enough, after all. His attitude toward women, which, had formerly so enraged her, was only on the surface. An affectation assumed to annoy her when they were always quarreling. How foolish she had been not to read him more accurately. For the first time, she felt a little return of self-confidence. She would bring this hazardous experiment to a successful conclusion, after all. It was really failure that she had most feared.

But her heart sank within her once more when at last they drew up in front of a long, low cabin built of logs. Mr. Sharp had not overstated the dilapidated state of the fence. It sagged in half a dozen places and one hinge of the gate was broken. Altogether it was as dreary a picture as one could well imagine. The little cabin had the utterly forlorn look of a house that has long been unoccupied.

"Woa there! Stand still, can't you?" said Sharp, tugging at the reins.

"A tidy pull, that last bit," said Frank. "Trail's very bad."

"Stand still, you brute! Wait a minute, Mrs. Taylor."

"I guess she wants to get home."

Taylor vaulted lightly from his seat and, without waiting to help Nora, ran up the path to the house. As she stood up, trying to disentangle herself from the heavy lap-robe, she could hear a key turn noisily in a lock. With a jerk, he threw the door wide open.

"Wait a bit and I'll light the lamp, if I can find where the hell it's got to," he called. "This shack's about two foot by three, and I'm blamed if I can ever find a darned thing!"

Nora smiled to herself in the darkness.

She got down unassisted this time. Under the bright and starry sky she could see a long stretch of prairie, fading away, without a break into the darkness. A long way off she thought she could distinguish a light, but she could not be certain.

"I'll give you a hand with the trunk," called Sharp, laboriously climbing out of the wagon. "Woa there," as the mare pawed restlessly on the ground.

"I'll come and help you if you'll wait a bit. Come on in, Nora."

Nora hunted round among the numerous parcels underneath the seat until she found a meshed bag containing some bread, butter and other necessaries they had bought on the way to the station. Then she walked slowly up the path to her home.

She had the feeling that she was still a free agent as long as she remained outside. Once her foot had crossed the threshold----! It was like getting into an ice-cold bath. She dreaded the plunge. However, it must be taken. He was standing stock-still in the middle of the room as she reached the door, his heavy brows drawn together.

"I'm quite stiff after that long drive."

The moment the words were out of her mouth she wished to recall them. This was no way to begin. It was actually as if she had been trying to excuse herself for not coming more quickly when she was called. His whole attitude of frowning impatience showed that he had expected her to come at the sound of his voice. His face cleared at once.

"Are you cold?" he asked with a certain anxiety.

"No, not a bit; I was so well wrapped up."

"Well, it's freezing pretty hard. But, you see, it's your first winter and you won't feel the cold like we do?"

"How odd," said Nora. "I'll just bring some of the things in." She had an odd feeling that she didn't want to be alone with him just now, and said the first thing that entered her head.

"Don't touch the trunk, it's too heavy for you."

"Oh, I'm as strong as a horse."

"Don't touch it."

"I won't," she laughed.

He brushed by her and went on out to the rig, returning almost instantly with an arm full of parcels.

"We could all do with a cup of tea. Just have a look at the stove. It won't take two shakes to light a fire."

"It seems hardly worth while; it's so late."

"Oh, light the fire, my girl, and don't talk about it," he said good-humoredly.

On her knees before the stove, with her face as flushed as if it were already glowing, Nora raked away at the ashes. Through the open doorway she could see her husband and Mr. Sharp unfasten the trunk from the back of the wagon and start with it toward the house.

"This trunk of yours ain't what you might call light, Mrs. Taylor," said Sharp good-naturedly as he stepped over the threshold.

"You see it holds everything I own in the world," said Nora lightly.

"I guess it don't do that," laughed her husband. "Since this morning, you own a half share in a hundred and sixty acres of as good land as there is in the Province of Manitoba, and a mighty good shack, if I did build it all myself."

"To say nothing of a husband," retorted Nora.

"Where do you want it put?" asked Sharp.

"It 'ud better go in the next room right away. We don't want to be falling over it."

As they were carrying it in, Nora, with a rather helpless air, carried a couple of logs and a handful of newspapers over from the pile in the corner.

"Here, you'll never be able to light a fire with logs like that. Where's that darned ax? I'll chop 'em for you. I guess you'll have plenty to do getting the shack tidy."

After a little searching, he found the ax back of the wood-pile and set himself to splitting the logs. In the meantime, Sharp, who had made another pilgrimage to the rig, returned carrying his friend's grip and gun.

"Now, that's real good of you, Sid."

"Get any shooting down at Dyer, Frank?"

"There was a rare lot of prairie chickens round, but I didn't get out more than a couple of days."

"Well," said Sharp, taking off his fur cap and scratching his head, "I guess I'll be gettin' back home now."

"Oh, stay and have a cup of tea, won't you?"

"Do," said Nora, seconding the invitation.

She had taken quite a fancy to this rough, good-natured man. In spite of his straggly beard and unkempt appearance, there was a vague suggestion of the soldier about him. Besides, she had a vague feeling that she would like to postpone his departure as long as she could.

"I hope you won't be offended if I say that I would take you for English," she said, smiling brightly on him.

"You're right, ma'am, I am English."

"And a soldier?"

"I was a non-commissioned officer in a regiment back home, ma'am," he said, greatly pleased. "But why should I be offended?"

Nora and her husband exchanged glances.

"It's this way," Frank laughed. "Gertie, that's Nora's brother's wife--down where I've been working--ain't very partial to the English. I guess my wife's been rather fed up with her talk."

"Oh, I see. But, thank you all the same, and you, too, Mrs. Taylor, I don't think I'll stay. It's getting late and the mare'll get cold."

"Put her in the shed."

"No, I think I'll be toddling. My missus says I was to give you her compliments, Mrs. Taylor, and she'll be round to-morrow to see if there's anything you want."

"That's very kind of her. Thank you very much."

"Sid lives where you can see that light just about a mile from here, Nora," explained Frank. "Mrs. Sharp'll be able to help you a lot at first."

"Oh, well, we've been here for thirteen years and we know the ways of the country by now," deprecated Mr. Sharp.

"Nora's about as green as a new dollar bill, I guess."

"I fear that's too true," Nora admitted smilingly.

"There's a lot you can't be expected to know at first," protested their neighbor. "I'll say good night, then, and good luck."

"Well, good night then, Sid, if you won't stay. And say, it was real good of you to come and fetch us in the rig."

"Oh, that's all right. Good night to you, Mrs. Taylor."

"Goodnight."

Pulling his cap well down over his ears, Mr. Sharp took his departure. In the silence they could hear him drive away.

Nora went over to the stove again and made a pretense of examining the fire, conscious all the time that her husband was looking at her intently.

"I guess it must seem funny to you to hear him call you Mrs. Taylor, eh?"

"No. He isn't the first person to do so. The clergyman's wife did, you remember."

"That's so. How are you getting on with that fire?"

"All right."

"I guess I'll get some water; I'll only be a few minutes."

He took a pail and went out. Nora could hear him pumping down in the yard. Getting up hurriedly from her knees before the stove, she took up the lamp and held it high above her head.

This untidy, comfortless, bedraggled room was now hers, her home! She would not have believed that any human habitation could be so hopelessly dreary.

The walls were not even sealed, as at the brother's. Tacked, here and there, against the logs were pictures cut from illustrated papers, unframed, just as they were. The furniture, with the exception of the inevitable rocking-chair, worn and shabby from hard use, had apparently been made by Frank, himself, out of old packing boxes. The table had been fashioned by the same hand out of similar materials. On a shelf over the rusty stove stood a few battered pots and pans; evidently the entire kitchen equipment. There were two doors, one by which she had entered; the other, leading supposedly into another room. The one window was small and low. Even in this light she could see that a spider had spun a huge web across it. In the dark corners of the room all sorts of objects seemed to be piled without any pretense of order.

She lowered the lamp and listened. Yes, she could still hear the pump. With a furtive, guilty air she hurried to complete her examination before he should surprise her.

One of the corners contained a battered suitcase and a nondescript pile of old clothes, the other was piled high with yellowing copies of what she saw was the Winnipeg Free Press and a few old magazines.

"The library!" she said bitterly, and was surprised to find that she had spoken aloud. Insane people did that, she had heard. Was she----?

She ran over to a shelf that had escaped her notice, and the ill-fitting lamp chimney rattled as she moved. It was stacked high with the same empty syrup cans that at Gertie's did the duty of flower-pots. But these held flour, now quite mouldy, and various other staple supplies all spoiled and useless. She started to say "the larder," but, remembering in time, put her hand over her lips that she might only think it.

And now she had come to that other door. She must see what was there.

"Having a look at the shack?"

She gave a stifled scream and for a moment turned so pale that he hastily set down his pail and went over to her.

"I guess you're all tuckered out," he said kindly. "No wonder. You've had quite a little excitement the last day or two."

With a tremendous effort, Nora recovered her self-control. She walked steadily over to one of the packing-box stools and sat down.

"It was silly of me, but you don't know how you startled me. Don't think I usually have nerves, but--but the place was strange last night and I didn't sleep very well."

"Do you mind if I open the door a moment?" she asked after a short pause. "It isn't really cold and it looks so beautiful outside. One can't see anything out of the window, you know, it's so cobwebby. I must clean it--to-morrow."

Try as she would, her voice faltered on the last word.

She threw open the door and stood a moment looking out into the bright Canadian night brilliant with stars. It was all so big, so open, so free--and so lonely! You could fairly hear the stillness. But she must not think of that. Ah, there was the light that she had been told was the Sharp's farm. Somehow, it brought her comfort. But even as she watched, the light went out. She came in and closed the door.

CHAPTER XII

He was sitting on one of the stools, pipe in mouth, reading a newspaper he had already read in the train.

"Well, what do you think of the shack?"

"I don't know."

"I built it with my own hands. Every one of them logs was a tree I cut down myself. You wait till morning and I'll show you how they're joined together, at the corners. There's some neat work there, my girl, I guess."

"Yes? Oh, I was forgetting; here's the kettle." She brought it over to him from the shelf. He filled the kettle carefully from the pail while she stood and watched him. She took it from his hand and set it on the stove to boil.

"You'll find some tea in one of them cans on the shelf; leastways, there was some there when I come away. I reckon you're hungry."

"I don't think I am, very. I ate a very good supper on the train, you know."

"I'm glad you call that a good supper. I guess I could wrap up the amount you ate in a postage stamp."

"Well," she said with a smile, "you may be glad to learn that I haven't a very large appetite."

"I have, then. Where's the loaf we got in Winnipeg this afternoon?"

"I'll get it."

"And the butter. You'll bake to-morrow, I reckon."

"You're a brave man--unless you've forgotten my first attempt at Eddie's," she said with a laugh as she took the loaf and butter from the bag.

For some reason her mood had completely changed. All her confidence in being perfectly able to take care of herself had returned. She had been frightened, badly frightened a moment ago at nothing. Nerves, nothing more. Nerves were queer things. It was because she hadn't slept last night. She was such a good sleeper naturally that a wakeful night affected her more than it did most people. The cool night air had completely restored her.

She hunted about until she found a knife, and with the loaf in one hand and the knife poised in the air asked:

"Shall I cut you some?"

"Yep."

"Please."

"Please what?"

"Yep, please," she said with a gay smile.

"Oh!" he growled.

Still smiling, she cut several slices of bread and buttered them. Going to the shelf, she found the teapot and shook some tea into it from one of the cans, measuring it carefully with her eye. His momentary ill humor, caused by her correcting him, vanished as he watched her.

"I guess it's about time you took your hat and coat off," he said with a chuckle.

As a matter of fact, she was not conscious that they were still on. Without a word, she took them off and, having given her coat a little shake and a pat, looked about her for a place to put them. She ended finally by putting them both on the kitchen chair.

"You ain't terribly talkative for a woman, are you, my girl?"

"I haven't anything to say for the moment," said Nora.

"Well, I guess it's better to have a wife as talks too little than a wife as talks too much."

"I suppose absolute perfection is rare--in women, poor wretches," she said in the old ironic tone she had always used toward him while he was her brother's hired man.

"What's that?" he said sharply.

"I was only amusing myself with a reflection."

He checked an angry retort, and striding over to a nail in the wall, took off his coat and hung it up. Somehow, he looked larger than ever in his gray sweater. A sense of comfort and unaccustomed well-being restored him to good humor. Throwing himself into the rocker, he stretched out his long legs luxuriantly.

"I guess there's no place like home. You get a bit fed up with hiring out. Ed was O. K., I reckon, but it ain't like being your own boss."

"I should think it wouldn't be," said Nora quietly.

"Where does that door go?" she asked presently.

"That? Oh, into the bedroom. Like to have a look?"

"No."

"No what?" he said quickly.

Nora turned from the shelf where she had been contriving a place to put the things they had brought from the town, and looked at him inquiringly. His face was grave, but a twinkle in his eye betrayed him. She blushed charmingly to the roots of her hair, but her laugh was perfectly frank and good-humored. "I beg your pardon. I was so occupied with arranging my pantry that I forgot my manners. No, thank you."

"One can't be too careful about these important things," he said with rather heavy humor. "When I built this shack," he went on proudly--but the pride was the pride of possession, not of achievement--"I fixed it up so as it would do when I got married. Sid Sharp asked me what in hell I wanted to divide it up in half for, but I guess women like little luxuries like that."

"Like what?"

"Like having a room to sleep in and a room to live in."

"Here's the bread and butter," said Nora abruptly. "Will you have some syrup?"

"S-u-r-e." He got up out of the rocking chair and pulling one of the stools up to the table, sat down.

"The water ought to be boiling by now; what about milk?"

"That's one of the things you'll have to learn to do without till I can afford to buy a cow."

"I can't drink tea without milk."

"You try. Say, can you milk a cow?"

"I? No."

"Then it's just as well I ain't got one."

Nora laughed. "You are a philosopher."

Having filled the teapot with boiling water and set it on the table, she returned to the shelf and began moving the things about in search of something.

"What you looking for?"

"Is there a candle? I'll just get one or two things out of my box and bring in here."

"Ain't you going to sit down and have a cup of tea?"

"I don't want any, thanks."

"Sit down, my girl."

"Why?"

"Because I tell you to." The command was smilingly given.

"I don't think you'd better tell me to do things." Nora could smile, too.

"Then I ask you. You ain't going to refuse the first favor I've asked you?"

"Certainly not," she said in her most charming manner. Pulling another of the stools up to the table, she sat facing him.

"There."

"Now, pour out my tea for me, will you? I tell you," he said, watching her slim hands moving among the tea things, "it's rum seeing my wife sitting down at my table and pouring out tea for me."

"Is it pleasant?"

"Sure. Now have some tea yourself, my girl. You'll soon get used to drinking it without milk. And I guess you'll be able to get some to-morrow from Mrs. Sharp."

Nora noticed that he did not taste his tea until she had poured herself a cup.

"Just take a bit of the bread and butter."

He passed her the plate and she, still smiling brightly, broke off a small half of one of the slices.

"I had a sort of feeling I wanted you and me to have the first meal together in your new home," he said gently.

Then, with a sudden change of manner, he laughed aloud.

"We ain't lost much time, I guess. Why, it's only yesterday you told me not to call you Nora. You did flare out at me!"

"That was very silly of me, but I was in a temper."

"And now we're man and wife."

"Yes: married in haste with a vengeance."

"Ain't you a bit scared?"

"I? What of? You?"

Her voice was steady, but the hands in her lap were clenched.

"With Ed miles away, t'other side of Winnipeg, he might just as well be in the old country for all the good he can be to you. You might naturally be a bit scared to find yourself alone with a man you don't know."

"I'm not the nervous sort."

"Good for you!"

"You did give me a fright, though," said Nora, with a laugh, "when I asked you if you'd take me. I suppose it was only about fifteen seconds before you answered, but it seemed like ten minutes. I thought you were going to refuse. How Gertie would have gloated!"

"I was thinking."

"I see. Counting up my good points and balancing them against my bad ones."

"N-o-o-o: I was thinking you wouldn't have asked me like that if you hadn't of despised me."

Nora caught her breath sharply, but her manner lost none of its lightness.

"I don't know what made you think that."

"Well, I don't know how you could have put it more plainly that my name was mud."

"Why didn't you refuse, then?"

"I guess I'm not the nervous sort, either," he remarked dryly over his teacup.

" And," Nora reminded him, "women are scarce in Manitoba."

"I've always fancied an English woman," he went on, ignoring her little thrust. "They make the best wives going when they've been licked into shape."

Nora showed her amusement frankly.

"Are you purposing to attempt that operation on me?"

"Well, you're clever. I guess a hint or two is about all you'll want."

"You embarrass me when you pay me compliments."

"I'll take you round and show you the land to-morrow," he said, tilting back on his stool, to the imminent peril of his equilibrium. "I ain't done all the clearing yet, so there'll be plenty of work for the winter. I want to have a hundred acres to sow next year. And then, if I get a good crop, I've a mind to take another quarter. You can't make it pay really without you've got half a section. And it's a tough proposition when you ain't got capital."

"I had no idea I was marrying a millionaire."

"Never you mind, my girl, you shan't live in a shack long, I promise you. It's the greatest country in the world. We only want three good crops and you shall have a brick house same as you lived in back home."

"I wonder what they're doing in England now."

"Well, I guess they're asleep."

"When I think of England I always think of it at tea time," began Nora, and then stopped short.

A wave of regret caught her throat. In spite of herself, the tears filled her eyes. She looked miserably at the cheap, ugly tea things on the makeshift table before her. Her husband watched her gravely. Presently she went on, more to herself than to him:

"Miss Wickham had a beautiful old silver teapot, a George Second. She was awfully proud of it. And she was proud of her tea-set; it was old Worcester. And she wouldn't let anyone wash the tea things but----" Again, her voice failed her. "And two or three times a week an old Indian judge came in to tea. And he used to talk to me about the East, the wonderful, beautiful East. He made me long to see it all--I who had never been anywhere. I've always loved history and books of travel more than anything else. There are a lot of them there in my box--that's what makes it so heavy--all about the beautiful places I was going to see later on with the money Miss Wickham promised me----" her glance took in the mean little room in all its unrelieved ugliness. "Oh, why did you make me think of it all?"

She bowed her head on the table for a moment. Taylor laid his hand gently on her arm.

"The past is dead and gone, my girl. We've got the future; it's ours."

She gently disengaged herself from his detaining hand and went over to the little window, looking out with eyes that saw other pictures than the window had to show.

"One never knows when one's well off, does one? It's madness to think of what's gone forever."

For several minutes there was silence, during which Nora recovered her self-control. Having wiped away her tears, she turned hack to him, smiling bravely. "I beg your pardon. You'll think me more foolish than I really am. I'm not the crying sort, I assure you. But I don't know, it all----"

"That's all right, I know you're not," he said roughly. "I wish we'd got a good drop of liquor here," he went on with the evident intention of changing the current of her thoughts, "so as we could drink one another's health. But as we ain't, you'd better give me a kiss instead."

"I'm not at all fond of kissing," said Nora coolly.

Frank grinned at her, his pipe stuck between his white teeth.

"It ain't, generally speaking, an acquired taste. I guess you must be peculiar."

"It looks like it," she said lightly.

"Come, my girl," he said, getting slowly up from his stool, "you didn't even kiss me after we was married."

"Isn't a hint enough for you?"--her tone was perfectly friendly. "Why do you insist on my saying everything in so many words? Why make me dot my i's and cross my t's, so to speak?"

"It seems to me it wants a few words to make it plain when a woman refuses to give her husband a kiss."

"Do sit down, there's a good fellow, and I'll tell you one or two things."

"That's terribly kind of you," he said, sinking into the rocker. "Have you any choice of seats?"

"Not now, since you've taken the only one that's tolerably comfortable. I think there's nothing to choose between the others."

"Nothing, I should say."

"I think we'd better fix things up before we go any further," she said, resuming her stool.

"Sure."

"You gave me to understand very plainly that you wanted a wife in order to get a general servant without having to pay her wages. Wages are high, here in Canada."

"That was the way you put it."

"Batching isn't very comfortable, you'll confess that?"

"I'll confess that, all right."

"You wanted someone to cook and bake for you, wash, sweep and mend. I offered to come and do all that for you. It never entered my head for an instant that there was any possibility of your expecting anything else of me."

"Then you're a damned fool, my girl."

He was perfectly good-natured. She would have preferred him to be a little angry. She would know how to cope with that, she thought. But she flared up a little herself.

"D'you mind not saying things like that to me?"

His smile widened. "I guess I'll have to say a good many things like that--or worse--before we've done."

"I asked you to marry me only because I couldn't stay in the shack otherwise."

"You asked me to marry you because you was in the hell of a temper," he retorted. "You were mad clean through. You wanted to get away from Ed's farm right then and there and you didn't care what you did so long as you quit. But you was darned sorry for what you'd done by the time you'd got your trunk packed."

"I don't know that you have any reason for thinking that," she said stiffly.

"I've got sense. Besides, when you opened the door when I went up and knocked, you was as white as a sheet. You'd have given anything you had to say you'd changed your mind, but your damned pride wouldn't let you."

"I wouldn't have stayed longer in that house for anything in the world," said Nora with passion.

"There you are; that's just what I have been telling you," he said, nodding his head. "And this morning, when I came for you at the Y. W. C. A., you wanted bad to say you wouldn't marry me. When you shook hands with me your hand was like ice. You tried to speak the words, but they wouldn't come."

"After all, one isn't married every day of one's life, is one? I admit I was nervous for the moment."

"If I hadn't shown you the license and the ring, I guess you wouldn't have done it. You hadn't the nerve to back out of it then."

"I hadn't slept a wink all night. I kept on turning it over in my mind. I was frightened at what I'd done. I didn't know a soul in Winnipeg. I hadn't anywhere to go. I had four dollars in my pocket. I had to go on with it."

"Well, you took pretty good stock of me in the train on the way here, I guess," he laughed, pacing up and down the room.

"What makes you think so?" asked Nora, who had recovered her coolness.

"Well, I felt you was looking at me a good deal while I was asleep," he jeered. "It wasn't hard to see that you was turning me over in your mind. What conclusion did you come to?"

Nora evaded the question for the moment.

"You see, I lived all these years with an old lady. I know very little about men."

"I guessed that."

"I came to the conclusion that you were a decent fellow and I thought you would be kind to me."

"Bouquets are just flying round! Have you got anything more to say to me?" he asked, seating himself once more in his chair.

"No, I think not."

"Then just get me my tobacco pouch, will you? I guess you'll find it in the pocket of my coat."

With narrowed eyes, he watched her first hesitate, and then bring it to him.

"Here you are." Her tone was crisp.

"I thought you was going to tell me I could darned well get it myself," he laughed.

"I don't very much like to be ordered about," she said smoothly; "I didn't realize it was one of your bad habits."

"You never paid much attention to me or my habits till to-day, I reckon."

"I was always polite to you."

"Oh, very! But I was the hired man, and you'd never let me forget it. You thought yourself a darned sight better than me, because you could play the piano and speak French. But we ain't got a piano and there ain't anyone as speaks French nearer than Winnipeg."

"I don't just see what you're driving at."

"Parlor tricks ain't much good on the prairie. They're like dollar bills up in Hudson Bay country. Tobacco's the only thing you can trade with an Esquimaux. You can't cook very well, you don't know how to milk a cow; why, you can't even harness a horse."

"Are you regretting your bargain already?"

"No," he said, going over to the shelf in search of the matches, "I guess I can teach you. But if I was you"--he paused, the lighted match in his fingers, to look at her--"I wouldn't put on any airs. We'll get on O. K., I guess, when we've shaken down."

"You'll find I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself," she said with emphasis, speaking each word slowly. She returned his steady gaze and felt a thrill of victory when he looked away.

"When two people live in a shack," he went on as if she had not spoken, "there's got to be a deal of give and take on both sides. As long as you do what I tell you you'll be all right."

A sort of an angry smile crossed Nora's face.

"It's unfortunate that when anyone tells me to do a thing, I have an irresistible desire not to do it."

"I guess I tumbled to that. You must get over it."

"You've spoken to me once or twice in a way I don't like. I think we shall get on better if you ask me to do things."

"Don't forget that I can make you do them," he said brutally.

"How?" Really, he was amusing!

"Well, I'm stronger than you are."

"A man can hardly use force in his dealings with a woman," she reminded him.

"O-o-o-oh?"

"You seem surprised."

"What's going to prevent him?"

"Don't be so silly," she retorted as she turned to look once more out of the window. But her hands were clammy and, somehow, even though her back was turned toward him, she knew that he was smiling.

CHAPTER XIII

How much time elapsed before he spoke she had no means of knowing; probably, at most, two or three minutes. But to the woman gazing out blindly through the cobweb-covered window into the night, it might well have been hours. For some illogical reason, which she could not have explained to herself, she had the feeling that the victory in the coming struggle would lie with the one who kept silent the longer. To break the nerve-wrecking spell would be a betrayal of weakness.

None the less, she had arrived at the point when, the tension on her own nerves becoming too great, she felt she must scream, drive her clenched hand through the glass of the window, or perform some other act of hysterical violence; then he spoke, and in the ordinary tone of daily life.

"Well, I'm going to unpack my grip."

The tone, together with the commonplace words, had the effect of a cold douche. She drew a sharp breath of relief, her hands unclenched. She was herself once more. She'd won.

She turned slowly, as if reluctant to abandon the starry prospect without, to find him bending over a clutter of things scattered about his half-emptied case. She had been about to say that she must see to unpacking some of her own things.

"Wash up them things." He jerked his bowed head toward the littered table.

For the first time, his tone was curt.

But she was too much mistress of herself and the situation now to be more than faintly annoyed by it.

"I'll wash them up in the morning," she said casually. She started toward the door behind which her box had been carried.

"Wash 'em up now, my girl. You'll find the only way to keep things clean is to wash 'em the moment you've done with 'em."

She smiled at him over her shoulder, her hand on the knob of the door. But she did not move.

"Did you hear what I said?"

"I did."

"Then why don't you do as I tell you?"

"Because I don't choose to."

"You ain't taking long to try it out, are you?" His face wore an ugly sneer.

"They say there's no time like the present."

"Are you going to wash up them things?"

"No."

There was a moment's silence while he held her eyes with his. Then, very slowly and deliberately he got up, poured some boiling water into a pan and placed it, together with a ragged dishcloth, on the table.

"Are you going to wash up them things?"

"No."

She was still cool and smiling: only, her grip on the knob of the door had tightened until the nails of her fingers were white.

"Do you want me to make you?"

"How can you do that?"

"I'll soon show you."

She waited the fraction of a moment.

"I'll just get out those rugs, shall I? I think the holdall was put in here. I expect it gets very cold toward morning."

She had opened the door now and stepped across the threshold. Her face was still turned toward his, but her smile was a little fixed.

"Nora."

"Yes."

"Come here."

"Why?"

"Because I tell you to."

Still, she did not move. In two strides he was over at her side. He stretched out his hand to seize her by the wrist.

"You daren't touch me!"

She pulled the door to sharply and stood with her back against it, facing him. Her face was as white as a linen mask, and about as expressionless. Only her eyes lived. Anger and fear had enlarged the pupils until they seemed black in the dead white of her face.

"You daren't!" she repeated.

"I daren't: who told you that?"

"Have you forgotten that I'm a woman?"

"No, I haven't. That's why I'm going to make you do as I tell you. If you were a man, I mightn't be able to. Come, now."

He made a movement to take her by the arm, but she was too quick for him. With the quickness of a cat, she slipped aside. The next moment, to his astonishment, he felt a stinging blow on the ear. He stared at her dumbfounded. It is safe to hazard that never in his life had he been so utterly taken aback.

She met his stare without lowering her glance. But she was panting now as if she had been running, one clenched hand pressed against her heaving breast.

He gave a short laugh, half of amused admiration at her daring, and half of anger.

"That was a darned silly thing to do!"

"What did you expect?"

"I expected that you were cleverer than to hit me. You ought to know that when it comes to--to muscle, I guess I've got the bulge on you."

"I'm not frightened of you."

It was a stupid thing to say. Nora realized it too late. If she had only been able to hold her tongue, he might have relented, she thought. But at her words, his face hardened once more and the same steely glitter came into his eyes. "Now come and wash up these things."

"I won't, I tell you!"

"Come on."

Quickly grasping her by the wrists, he began to drag her slowly but steadily to the table. Earlier in the evening she had boasted that she was as strong as a horse. As a matter of fact, she had unusual strength for a woman. But she was quickly made to realize that her strength, even intensified as it was by her anger was, of course, nothing compared with his. Strain and resist as she might, she could neither release herself from his grasp nor prevent him from forcing her nearer and nearer to the table which was his goal. In the struggle one of the large shell hair pins which she wore fell to the floor. In another second she heard it ground to pieces under his heel. A long strand of hair came billowing down below her waist.

Another moment, and by making a long arm, he could reach the table. With a quick movement for which she was unprepared, he brought her two hands sharply together so that he could hold both of her wrists with one hand, leaving the other free.

"Let me go, let me go!"

She kicked him, first on one shin and then on the other. But their bodies were too close together for the blows to have any force.

"Come on now, my girl. What's the good of making a darned fuss about it." His laugh was boyish in its exultant good-nature.

"You brute, how dare you touch me! You'll never force me to do anything. Let go! Let go! Let go!"

And now, his free hand held fast the edge of the table. With a quick movement she bent down and fastened her teeth in the skin of the back of his hand. With an exclamation of pain, he released her, carrying his wounded hand instinctively to his mouth.

"Gee, what sharp teeth you've got!"

"You cad! you cad!" she panted.

"I never thought you'd bite," he said, looking at his bleeding hand ruefully. "That ain't much like a lady, according to my idea."

"You filthy cad! To hit a woman!"

"Gee, I didn't hit you. You smacked my face and kicked my shins, and you bit my hand. And now you say I hit you."

He picked up his pipe from the table and mechanically rammed the tobacco down with his thumb and looked about for a match.

"You beast! I hate you!"

In the height of her passion she unconsciously began twisting up the loosened strand of her hair.

"I don't care about that, so long as you wash them cups."

With a furious gesture she swept the table clean.

"Look!" she screamed, as cups, saucers, plates and teapot broke into a thousand pieces at his feet.

There came another little sound of something breaking, like a faint echo far away. It was his pipe which had fallen among the wreckage. In his astonishment at her sudden action, he had bitten through the mouthpiece.

"That's a pity; we're terribly short of crockery. We shall have to drink our tea out of cans now," was all he said.

"I said I wouldn't wash them, and I haven't washed them," Nora exulted.

"They don't need it now, I guess," he said humorously.

"I think I've won!"

"Sure," he said without the slightest trace of rancor. "Now take the broom and sweep up all the darned mess you've made."

"I won't!"

"Look here, my girl," he said threateningly, "I guess I've had about enough of your nonsense: you do as you're told and look sharp about it."

"You can kill me, if you like!"

"What would be the good of that? Women, as you reminded me a little while back, are scarce in Manitoba."

He gave a searching look around the room and spying the broom in the corner, went over and fetched it.

"Here's the broom."

"If you want that mess swept up, you can sweep it up yourself."

"Look here, you make me tired!"

His tone suggested that he was becoming more irritated. But Nora was beyond caring. As he put the broom in her hand, she flung it from her as far as she could. "Look here," he said again, and this time there was no mistaking the menace in his voice, "if you don't clean up that mess at once, I'll give you the biggest hiding you ever had in your life, I promise you that."

"You?" she jeered.

"Yours truly," he said, nodding his head. "I've done with larking now." He began rolling up the sleeves of his sweater. For some obscure reason--possibly because his deliberation seemed to connote implacability--this simple action filled her with a terror that she had not known before even in the midst of their physical struggle.

"Help! Help! Help!" she screamed.

She rushed across the room and threw open the door, sending her agonized appeal out into the night.

"Help! Help! Help!"

She strained her ears for any sign of response.

"What's the good of that? There's no one within a mile of us. Listen."

It is doubtful if she heard his words. If she had, it would have mattered but little. The answering silence which engulfed her like a wave told her that she was lost. She bowed her head in her hands. Her whole slender body was wrecked with hard, dry sobs. When she lifted her head, he read in her eyes the anguish of the conquered. Nevertheless, she made one last stand.

"If you so much as touch me, I'll have you up for cruelty. There are laws to protect me."

"I don't care a curse for the laws," he laughed. "I know I'm going to be master here. And if I tell you to do a thing, you've darned well got to do it, because I can make you. Now stop this fooling. Pick up that crockery and get the broom."

"I won't!"

He made one stride toward her.

"No, don't. Don't hurt me!" she shrieked.

"I guess there's only one law here," he said. "And that's the law of the strongest. I don't know nothing about cities; perhaps men and women are equal there. But on the prairie, a man's the master because he's bigger and stronger than a woman."

"Frank!"

"Damn you, don't talk."

She did not move. Her eyes were on the ground. Pride and Fear were having their last struggle, and Fear conquered. Without looking at her husband she could feel that his patience was nearing an end. Very slowly she stooped down and picked up the teapot and the broken cups and saucers and laid them on the table. Blindly she tottered over to the rocking-chair and burst into a passion of tears.

"And I thought I knew what it was to be unhappy!"

He watched her with a slight, but not unkindly, smile on his face.

"Come on, my girl," he said, without any trace of anger, "don't shirk the rest of it."

Through her laced fingers, she looked at the mess of spilled tea on the floor. Keeping her tear-marred face turned away from him, she slowly got up, and slowly found the broom and swept it all into a little heap on the newspaper that lay where he had left it.

Suddenly she threw back her head. Her eyes shone with a new resolution. He watched her, wondering. With a quick, firm step, she carried the rolled-up paper to the stove and shoved it far into the glowing embers. Gathering up the crockery, after a glance around the room in search of some receptacle which her eye did not find, she carried it over to the wood-pile, laying it upon the logs. The broom was restored to its corner. She took up her hat and coat and began to put them on.

"What are you doing?"

"I've done what you made me do, now I'm going."

"Where, if I might ask?"

"What do I care, as long as I get away."

"You ain't under the impression that there's a first-class hotel round the corner, are you? There ain't."

"I can go to the Sharps."

"I guess they're in bed and asleep by now."

"I'll wake them."

"You'd never find your way. It's pitch dark. Look."

He threw open the door. It was true. The sky had clouded over. The feeling of the air had changed. It smelt of storm.

"I'll sleep out of doors, then."

"On the prairie? Why, you'd freeze to death before morning."

"What does it matter to you whether I live or die?"

"It matters a great deal. Once more, let me remind you that women are scarce in Manitoba."

"Are you going to keep me from going?"

"Sure."

He closed the door and placed his back against it.

"You can't keep me here against my will. If I don't go to-night, I can go to-morrow."

"To-morrow's a long, long way off."

Her hand flew to her throat.

"Frank! What do you mean?"

"I don't know what silly fancies you've had in your head; but when I married you I intended that you should be a proper wife to me."

"But--but--but you understood."

It was all she could do to force the words from her dry throat. With a desperate effort she pulled herself together and tried to talk calmly and reasonably.

"I'm sorry for the way I've behaved, Frank. It was silly and childish of me to struggle with you. You irritated me, you see, by the way you spoke and the tone you took."

"Oh, I don't mind. I don't know much about women and I guess they're queer. We had to fix things up sometime and I guess there's no harm in getting it over right now."

"You've beaten me all along the line and I'm in your power. Have mercy on me!"

"I guess you won't have much cause to complain."

"I married you in a fit of temper. It was very stupid of me. I'm very sorry that I--that I've been all this trouble to you. Won't you let me go?"

"No, I can't do that."

"I'm no good to you. You've told me that I'm useless. I can't do any of the things that you want a wife to do. Oh," she ended passionately, "you can't be so hard-hearted as to make me pay with all my whole life for one moment's madness!"

"What good will it do you if I let you go? Will you go to Gertie and beg her to take you back again? You've got too much pride for that."

She made a gesture of abnegation: "I don't think I've got much pride left."

"Don't you think you'd better give it a try?"

Once more hope wakened in Nora's heart. His tone was so reasonable. If she kept her self-control, she might yet win. She sat down on one of the stools and spoke in a tone that was almost conversational.

"All this life is so strange to me. Back in England, they think it's so different from what it really is. I thought I should have a horse to ride, that there would be dances and parties. And when I came out, I was so out of it all. I felt in the way. And yesterday Gertie drove me frantic so that I felt I couldn't stay a moment longer in that house. I acted on impulse. I didn't know what I was doing. I made a mistake. You can't have the heart to take advantage of it."

"I knew you was making a mistake, but that was your lookout. When I sell a man a horse, he can look it over for himself. I ain't obliged to tell him its faults."

"Do you mean to say that after I've begged you almost on my knees to let me go, you'll force me to stay?"

[Illustration: FRANK GLIMPSES THE APPROACHING STORM THAT MEANS HIS RUIN.]

"That's what I mean."

"Oh, why did I ever trap myself so!"

"Come, my girl, let's let bygones be bygones," he said good-humoredly. "Come, give me a kiss."

She tried a new tack.

"I'm not in love with you," she said in a matter-of-fact voice.

"I guessed that."

"And you're not in love with me."

"You're a woman and I'm a man."

"Do you want me to tell you in so many words that you're physically repellent to me? That the thought of letting you kiss me horrifies and disgusts me?" In spite of her resolution, her voice was rising.

"Thank you." He was still good-humored.

"Look at your hands; it gives me goose-flesh when you touch me."

"Cuttin' down trees, diggin', lookin' after horses don't leave them very white and smooth."

"Let me go! Let me go!"

He took a step away from the door. His whole manner changed.

"See here, my girl. You was educated like a lady and spent your life doin' nothing. Oh, I forgot: you was a lady's companion, wasn't you? And you look on yourself as a darned sight better than me. I never had no schooling. It's a hell of a job for me to write a letter. But since I was so high"--his hand measured a distance of about three feet from the floor--"I've earned my living. I guess I've been all over this country. I've been a trapper, I've worked on the railroad and for two years I've been a freighter. I guess I've done pretty nearly everything but clerk in a store. Now you just get busy and forget all the nonsense you've got in your head. You're nothing but an ignorant woman and I'm your master. I'm goin' to do what I like with you. And if you don't submit willingly, by God I'll take you as the trappers, in the old days, used to take the squaws."

For the last moment Nora could hardly have been said to have listened. In a delirium of terror her eyes swept the little cabin, searching desperately for some means of escape. As he made a step toward her, her roving eye suddenly fell on her husband's gun, standing where Sharp had left it when he brought it in. With a bound, she was across the room, the gun at her shoulder. With an oath, Frank started forward.

"If you move, I'll kill you!"

"You daren't!"

"Unless you open that door and let me go, I'll shoot you--I'll shoot you!"

"Shoot, then!" He held his arms wide, exposing his broad chest.

With a sobbing cry, she pulled the trigger. The click of the falling hammer was heard, nothing more.

"Gee whiz!" shouted Taylor in admiration. "Why, you meant it!"

The gun fell clattering to the floor.

"It wasn't loaded?"

"Of course it wasn't loaded. D'you think I'd have stood there and told you to shoot if it had been? I guess I ain't thinking of committin' suicide."

"And I almost admired you!"

"You hadn't got no reason to. There's nothing to admire about a man who stands five feet off a loaded gun that's being aimed at him. He'd be a darned fool, that's all."

"You were laughing at me all the time."

"You'd have had me dead as mutton if that gun 'ud been loaded. You're a sport, all right, all right. I never thought you had it in you. You're the girl for me, I guess!"

As she stood there, dazed, perfectly unprepared, he threw his arms around her and attempted to kiss her.

"Let me alone! I'll kill myself if you touch me!"

"I guess you won't." He kissed her full on the mouth, then let her go.

Sinking into a chair, she sobbed in helpless, angry despair.

"Oh, how shameful, how shameful!"

He let her alone for a little; then, when the violence of her sobbing had died away, came over and laid his hand gently on her shoulder.

"Hadn't you better cave in, my girl? You've tried your strength against mine and it hasn't amounted to much. You even tried to shoot me and I only made you look like a darned fool. I guess you're beat, my girl. There's only one law here. That's the law of the strongest. You've got to do what I want because I can make you."

"Haven't you any generosity?"

"Not the kind you want, I guess."

She gave a little moan of anguish.

"Hark!" He held up his hand as if to call her attention to something. For a moment, hope flamed from its embers. But stealing a glance at his face from beneath her drooping lashes, she saw that she was mistaken. The last spark died, to be rekindled no more.

"Listen! Listen to the silence. Can't you hear it, the silence of the prairie? Why, we might be the only two people in the world, you and me, here in this little shack, right out in the prairie. Are you listening? There ain't a sound. It might be the garden of Eden. What's that about male and female, created He them? I guess you're my wife, my girl. And I want you."

Nora gave him a sidelong look of terror and remained dumb. What would have been the use of words even if she could have found voice to utter them?

Taking up the lamp, he went to the door of the bedroom and threw it wide. She saw without looking that he remained standing, like a statue of Fate, on the threshold.

To gain time, she picked up the dishcloth and began to scrub at an imaginary spot on the table.

"I guess it's getting late. You'll be able to have a good clean-out to-morrow."

"To-morrow!" A violent shudder, similar to the convulsion of the day before, shook her from head to foot. But she kept on with her scrubbing.

"Come!"

The word smote her ear with all the impact of a cannon shot. The walls caught it, and gave it back. There was no other sound in heaven or earth than the echo of that word!

Shame, anguish and fear, in turn, passed over her face. Then, with her hands before her eyes, she passed beyond him, through the door which he still held open.

CHAPTER XIV

The storm which the night had foreshadowed broke with violence before dawn. At times during the night, the wind had howled about the little building in a way which recalled to Nora one of the best-remembered holidays of her childhood. She and her mother had gone to Eastborne for a fortnight with some money Eddie had sent them shortly after his arrival in Canada. The autumnal equinox had caught them during the last days of their stay, and the strong impression which the wind had made upon her childish mind had remained with her ever since.

Lying, wakeful through the long hours, staring wide-eyed out of the little curtainless window into the thick darkness, thick enough to seem palpable; the memory of how, on that far-off day she had passed long hours with her nose flattened against the window of the dingy little lodging-house drawing-room watching the wonder of the wind-lashed sea, came back to her with extraordinary vividness.

The spectacle had filled her with a sort of terrified exultation. She had longed to go out and stand on the wind-buffeted pier and take her part in this saturnalia of the elements. She had something of the same feeling now; a longing to leave her bed and go out onto the windswept prairie.

Strangely enough, she had no sensation of fatigue or weariness either bodily or mentally. Her mind, indeed, seemed extraordinarily active. Little petty details of her childhood and of her life with Miss Wickham, long forgotten, such as the day the gardener had cut his thumb, trooped through her mind in an endless procession. She had a strange feeling that she would never sleep again.

But just as the blackness without seemed turning into heavy grayness, lulled possibly by the wind which had moderated its violence and had now sunk to a moan not unpleasant, and by the rythmic breathing of the sleeping man at her side, she fell asleep.

For several hours she must have slept heavily, indeed. For when she awoke, it was to find the place at her side empty. Hurriedly dressing herself, she went out into the living-room. That was empty, too. But the lamp was lighted, the kettle was singing merrily on the stove and the fire was burning brightly. And outside was a whirling veil of snow which made it impossible to see beyond the length of one's arm.

Had she been marooned on an island in the ultimate ocean of the Antartic, she could not have felt more cut off from the world she knew. Well, it was better so.

She wondered what had become of Frank. Surely on a day like this there could be nothing to do outside; and even if there were, nothing so imperative as to take him away before he had had his breakfast. She felt a little hurt at his leaving without a word.

Evidently, he expected to return soon, however. The table was laid for two. She felt her face crimson as she saw that there was but one cup left. One of them must drink from one of those horrible tin cans. She did not ask herself which one it would be.

Partly to occupy herself and to take her thoughts away from the recollection of the events of the evening before, and partly prompted by a desire to have everything in readiness against her husband's return, she busied herself with the preparations for breakfast.

There were some eggs and a filch of bacon which they had brought from Winnipeg. She would make some toast, too. Very likely he didn't care for it, they certainly never had it at Gertie's, but in her house---- She smiled to think how quickly, in her mind, she had taken possession.

She was just beginning to think that she had been foolish to start her cooking without knowing at all when he was going to return, when she heard a great stamping and scraping of feet outside, and in another moment Frank's snow-covered figure darkened the doorway.

"Getting on with the breakfast? That's fine!" he called.

"It's quite ready: wherever have you been? I wouldn't have imagined that anyone could find a thing to do outside on a day like this."

"Oh, there's always something to do. But I just ran up to the Sharps' for a minute. I knew old mother Sharp wouldn't keep her promise about coming down to-day. She's all right, but she does hate to walk."

"Well, I'm sure I wouldn't blame anyone for choosing to stay indoors a day like this. But what did you want to see her in such a hurry for?"

"Oh, nothin' particular; I sort of thought maybe you wouldn't mind having a little milk with your tea on a gloomy morning like this," he said shamefacedly.

"That was awfully good of you; thank you very much," she said with real gratitude, as she thought of him tramping those two miles in the blinding storm.

"Do you think we are in for a blizzard?" she asked when they were at the table. To her unspeakable relief, she found that the one cup was intended for her; he had waved her toward the one chair, apparently the place of honor, contenting himself with one of the stools.

"N-o-o," he said, "I don't think so. It's beginning to lighten up a little already. And besides, don't you remember that I foretold a mildish winter?"

"I was forgetting that I had married a prophet," she smiled.

But all through the day the snow continued to fall steadily, although the wind had died away and, at intervals, the sun shone palely. At nightfall, it was still snowing.

The day passed quickly, as Nora found plenty to occupy herself with. By supper time she felt healthfully tired, with the added comfortable feeling that, for a novice, she had really accomplished a good deal.

The whole room certainly looked cleaner and the pots and pans, although not shining, were as near to it as hot water and scrubbing could make them. Fortunately, she had a quantity of fresh white paper in her trunk which greatly improved the appearance of the shelves.

During the day Frank left the house for longer or shorter intervals on various pretexts which she felt must be largely imaginary, trumped up for the occasion. She was agreeably surprised to find that he was sufficiently tactful to divine that she wanted to be alone.

While he was in the house he smoked his pipe incessantly and read some magazines which she had unpacked with some of her books. But she never glanced suddenly in his direction without finding that he was watching her.

"I tell you, this is fine," he said heartily as he was lighting his after-supper pipe. "Mrs. Sharp won't hardly know the place when she comes over. She's never seen it except when I was housekeeper. She doesn't think I'm much good at it. Leastways, she's always tellin' Sid that if she dies, he must marry again right away as soon as he can find anyone to have him, for fear the house gets to looking like this."

"That doesn't look like a very strong indorsement," Nora admitted.

The next day Nora woke to a world of such dazzling whiteness that she was blinded every time she attempted to look out on it.

"You want to be careful," her husband cautioned her; "getting snow-blinded isn't as much fun as you'd think. Even I get bad sometimes; and I'm used to it. Looks like one of them Christmas cards, don't it? Somebody sent Gertie one once and she showed it to us."

That afternoon, Mr. Sharp drove his wife down for the promised visit. As in his judgment the two women would want to be alone, he proposed to Frank to drive back home with him to give him the benefit of his opinion on some improvements he was contemplating.

"You're only wasting your time," Mrs. Sharp had remarked grimly. "There ain't going to be anything done to any of them barns before I get a lean-to on the house. You'd think even a man would know that a house that's all right for two gets a little small for seven," she added, scornfully, to Nora.

"Are there seven of you?"

"Me and Sid and five little ones. If that don't make seven, I've forgotten all the 'rithmetic I ever learned," said Mrs. Sharp briefly. "And let me tell you, you who're just starting in, that having children out here on the prairie half the time with no proper care, and particularly in winter, when maybe you're snowed up and the doctor can't get to you, ain't my idea of a bank holiday."

"I shouldn't think it would be," said Nora, sincerely shocked, although she found it difficult to hide a smile at her visitor's comparison; bank holidays being among her most horrid recollections.

Mrs. Sharp, despite a rather emphatic manner which softened noticeably as her visit progressed, turned out to be a stout, red-faced woman of middle age who seemed to be troubled with a chronic form of asthma. She was as unmistakably English as her husband. But like him, she had lost much of her native accent, although occasionally one caught a faint trace of the Cockney. She had two rather keen brown eyes which, as she talked, took in the room to its smallest detail.

"Well, I declare, I think you've done wonders considering you've only had a day and not used to work like this," she said heartily. "When Sid told me that Frank was bringing home a wife I said to myself: 'Well, I don't envy her her job; comin' to a shack that ain't been lived in for nigh unto six months and when it was, with only a man runnin' it.'"

"You don't seem to have a very high opinion of men's ability in the domestic line," said Nora with a smile.

"I can tell you just how high it is," said Mrs. Sharp with decision. "I would just as soon think of consultin' little Sid--an' he's goin' on three--about the housekeepin' as I would his father. It ain't a man's work. Why should he know anything about it?"

"Still," demurred Nora, "lots of men look after themselves somehow."

"Somehow's just the word; they never get beyond that. Of course I knew Frank would be sure to marry some day. And with his good looks it's a wonder he didn't do so long ago. Most girls is so crazy about a good-lookin' fellow that they never stop to think if he has anything else to him. Not that he hasn't lots of good traits, I don't mean that. But," she added shrewdly, "you don't look like the silly sort that would be taken in by good looks alone."

"No," said Nora dryly, "I don't think I am."

After that, until the two men returned, they talked of household matters, and Nora found that her new neighbor had a store of useful and practical suggestions to make, and, what was even better, seemed glad to place all her experience at her disposal in the kindliest and most friendly manner possible, entirely free from any trace of that patronage which had so maddened her in her sister-in-law.

"Now mind you," called Mrs. Sharp, as she laboriously climbed up to the seat beside her husband as they were driving away, "if Frank, here, gets at all upish--and he's pretty certain to, all newly married men do--you come to me. I'll settle him, never fear."

Frank laughed a little over-loudly at this parting shot, and Nora noticed that for some time after their guests had gone, he seemed unusually silent.

As for the Sharps, they also maintained an unwonted silence--which for Mrs. Sharp, at least, was something unusual--until they had arrived at their own door.

"Well?" queried Sharp, as they were about to turn in.

"It beats me," replied his wife. "Why, she's a lady. But she'll come out all right," she finished enigmatically, "she's got the right stuff in her, poor dear!"

In after years, when Nora was able to look back on this portion of her life and see things in just perspective, she always felt that she could never be too thankful that her days had been crowded with occupation. Without that, she must either have gone actually insane, or, in a frenzy of helplessness, done some rash thing which would have marred her whole life beyond repair.

After she found herself growing more accustomed to her new life--and, after all, the growing accustomed to it was the hardest part--she realized that she was only following the universal law of life in paying for her own rash act. The thought that she was paying with interest, being overcharged as it were, was but faint consolation: it only meant that she had been a fool. That conviction is rarely soothing.

Then, too, she gradually began to look at the situation from Frank's point of view. He had certainly acted within his rights, if with little generosity. But she had to acknowledge to herself that the obligation to be generous on his part was small. She could hardly be said to have treated him with much liberality in the past.

She had used him without scruple as a means to an end. She had made him the instrument for escaping from a predicament which she found unbearably irksome. That she had done so in the heat of passion was small palliation. For the present, at least, she wisely resolved to make the best of things. It could not last forever. The day must come when she could free herself from the bonds that now held her.

It was characteristic of her unyielding pride, of her reluctance to confess to defeat, that the thought of appealing to her brother never once entered her head.

For this reason, it was long before she could bring herself to write the promised letter to Eddie. What was there to say? The things that would have relieved her, in a sense, to tell, must remain forever locked in her own heart. In the end, she compromised by sending a letter confined entirely to describing her new home. As she read it over, she thanked the Fates that Eddie's was not a subtile or analytical mind. He would read nothing between the lines. But Gertie? Well, it couldn't be helped!

It was some two months after her marriage that she received a letter from Miss Pringle in answer to the one she had written while she was still an inmate of her brother's house.

Miss Pringle confined herself largely to an account of her Continental wanderings and her bloodless encounters with various foreigners and their ridiculous un-English customs from which she had emerged triumphant and victorious. Mrs. Hubbard's precarious state of health had led her into being unusually captious, it seemed. Miss Pringle was more than ever content to be back in Tunbridge Wells, where all the world was, by comparison, sane and reasonable in behavior.

When it came to touching upon her friend's amazing environment and unconventional experiences, Miss Pringle was discretion itself. But if her paragraphs had bristled with exclamation points, they could not, to one who understood her mental processes, have more clearly betrayed her utter disapproval and amazement that English people, and descendants of English people, could so far forget themselves as to live in any such manner.

Replying to this letter was only a degree less hard than writing to Eddie. Nora's ready pen faltered more than once, and many pages were destroyed before an answer was sent. She confined herself entirely to describing the new experience of a Canadian winter. Of her departure from her brother's roof and of her marriage, she said nothing whatever.

In accordance with her resolution to make the best of things, she set about making the shack more comfortable and homelike. There were many of those things which, small in themselves, count for much, that her busy brain planned to do during the time taken up in the necessary overhauling. This cleaning-up process had taken several days, interrupted as it was by the ordinary daily routine.

To her unaccustomed hand, the task of preparing three hearty meals a day was a matter that consumed a large amount of time, but gradually, day by day, she found herself systematizing her task and becoming less inexpert. To be sure she made many mistakes; once, indeed, in a fit of preoccupation, while occupied in rearranging the bedroom, burning up the entire dinner.

Upon his return, her husband had found her red-eyed and apologetic.

"Oh, well!" he said. "It ain't worth crying over. What is the saying? 'Hell wasn't built in a day'?"

Nora screamed with laughter. "I think you're mixing two old saws. Rome wasn't built in a day and Hell is paved with good intentions."

"Well," he laughed good-naturedly, "they both seem to hit the case."

He certainly was unfailingly good-tempered. Not that there were not times when Nora did not have to remind herself of her new resolution and he, for his part, exercise all his forbearance. But in the main, things went more smoothly than either had dared to hope from their inauspicious beginning.

The thing that Nora found hardest to bear was that he never lost a certain masterful manner. It was a continual reminder that she had been defeated. Then, too, he had a maddening way of rewarding her for good conduct which was equally hard to bear, until she realized that it was perfectly unconscious on his part.

For example: after she had struggled for a week with her makeshift kitchen outfit, small in the beginning but greatly reduced by her destructive outburst on the night of their arrival, he had, without saying a word to her of his intentions, driven over to Prentice and laid in an entire new stock of crockery and several badly needed pots and pans.

Nora had found it hard to thank him. If they had been labeled "For a Good Child" she could not have felt more humiliated. And what was equally trying, he seemed to have divined her thoughts, for his smile, upon receiving her halting thanks, had not been without a touch of malicious amusement.

On the other hand, all her little efforts to beautify the little house and make it more livable met with his enthusiastic approval and support. He was as delighted as a child with everything she did, and often, when baffled for the moment by some lack of material for carrying out some proposed scheme, he came to the rescue with an ingenious suggestion which solved the vexed problem at once.

And so, gradually, to the no small wonder of her neighbor, Mrs. Sharp, the shack began to take on an air of homely brightness and comfort which that lady's more pretentious place lacked, even after a residence of thirteen years.

Curtains tied back with gay ribands, taken from an old hat and refurbished, appeared at the windows; the old tin syrup cans, pasted over with dark green paper, were made to disgorge their mouldy stores and transform themselves into flower-pots holding scarlet geraniums; even the disreputable, rakish old rocking chair assumed a belated air of youth and respectability, wearing as it did a cushion of discreetly patterned chintz; and the packing-box table hid its deficiencies under a simple cloth. All these magic transformations Nora had achieved with various odds and ends which she found in her trunk.

Not to be outdone, Frank had contributed a well-made shelf to hold Nora's precious books and a sort of cupboard for her sewing basket and, for the crowning touch, had with much labor contrived some rough chairs to take the place of the packing-box affairs of unpleasant memory.

As has been said, Mrs. Sharp came, saw and wondered; but she had her own theory, all the same, which she confided to her husband.

All these little but significant changes, the result of their co-operative effort, had not been the work of days, but of weeks. By the time they had all been accomplished, the winter was practically over and spring was at hand. Looking back on it, it seemed impossibly short, although there had been times, in spite of her manifold occupations, when it had seemed to Nora that it was longer than any winter she had ever known. She looked forward to the coming spring with both pleasure and dread.

Through many a dark winter day she had pictured to herself how beautiful the prairie must be, clad in all the verdant livery of the most wonderful of the seasons. And yet it would mean a new solitude and loneliness to her, her husband, of necessity, being away through all the long daylight hours. She began to understand Gertie's dread of having no one to speak to. She avoided asking herself the question as to whether it was loneliness in general or the particular loneliness of missing her husband that she dreaded.

But she was obliged to admit to herself that the winter had wrought more transformations than were to be seen in the little shack.

CHAPTER XV

It had all come about so subtilely and gradually that she was almost unaware of it herself, this inward change in herself. Nora had by nature a quick and active mind, but she had also many inherited prejudices. It is a truism that it is much harder to unlearn than to learn, and for her it was harder, in the circumstances, than for the average person. Not that she was more set in her ways than other people, but that she had accepted from her childhood a definite set of ideas as to the proper conduct of life; a code, in other words, from which she had never conceived it possible to depart. People did certain things, or they did not; you played the game according to certain prescribed rules, or you didn't play it with decent people, that was all there was to it. One might as well argue that there was no difference between right and wrong as to say that this was not so.

Of course there were plenty of people on the face of the earth who thought otherwise, such as Chinese, Aborigines, Turks, and all sorts of unpleasant natives of uncivilized countries--Nora lumped them together without discrimination or remorse--but no one planned to pass their lives among them. And as for the sentiment that Trotter had enunciated one day at her brother's, that Canada was a country where everybody was as good as everybody else, that was, of course, utter nonsense. It was because the country was raw and new that such silly notions prevailed. No society could exist an hour founded upon any such theory.

And yet, here she was living with a man on terms of equality whom, when measured up with the standards she was accustomed to, failed impossibly. And yet, did he? That is, did he, in the larger sense? That he was woefully deficient in all the little niceties of life, that he was illiterate and ignorant could not be denied. But he was no man's fool, and, as far as his light shone, he certainly lived up to it. That was just it. He had a standard of his own.

She compared him with her brother, and with other men she had known and respected. Was he less honest? less brave? less independent? less scrupulous in his dealings with his fellowmen? To all these questions she was obliged to answer "No." And he was proud, too, and ambitious; ambitious to carve out a fortune with his own hands, beholden to neither man nor circumstances for the achievement. Certainly there was much that was fine about him.

And, as far as his treatment of herself was concerned, after that first terrible struggle for mastery, she had had nothing to complain of. He had been patient with her ignorance and her lack of capabilities in all the things that the women in this new life were so proficient in. Did she not, perhaps, fall as far below his standard as he did before hers? There was certainly something to be said on both sides.

There was one quality which he possessed to which she paid ungrudging tribute; never had she met a man so free from all petty pretense. He regretted his lack of opportunities for educating himself, but it apparently never entered his head to pretend a knowledge of even the simplest subject which he did not possess. The questions that he asked her from time to time about matters which almost any schoolboy in England could have answered, both touched and embarrassed her.

At first she had found the evenings the most trying part of the day. When not taken up with her household cares, she found herself becoming absurdly self-conscious in his society. They were neither of them naturally silent people, and it was difficult not to have the air of "talking down" to him, of palpably making conversation. Beyond the people at her brother's and the Sharps, they had not a single acquaintance in common. Her horizon, hitherto, had been, bounded by England, his by Canada.

Finally, acting on the suggestion he had made, but never again referred to, the unforgettable day when they were leaving for Winnipeg, she began reading aloud evenings while he worked on his new chairs. The experiment was a great success. Her little library was limited in range; a few standard works and a number of books on travel and some of history. She soon found that history was what he most enjoyed. Things that were a commonplace to her were revealed to him for the first time. And his comments were keen and intelligent, although his point of view was strikingly novel and at the opposite pole from hers. To be sure, she had been accustomed to accepting history merely as a more or less accurate record of bygone events without philosophizing upon it. But to him it was one long chronicle of wrong and oppression. He pronounced the dead and gone sovereigns of England a bad lot and cowardly almost without exception; not apparently objecting to them on the ground that they were kings, as she had at first thought, but because they attained their ends, mostly selfish, through cruelty and oppression, without any regard for humane rights.

It was the same way with books of travel. The chateaus and castles, with all their atmosphere of story and romance which she had always longed to visit, interested him not a jot. In his opinion they were, one and all, bloody monuments of greed and selfishness; the sooner they were razed to the ground and forgotten, the better for the world.

It was useless to make an appeal for them on artistic grounds; art to him was a doubly sealed book, and yet he frequently disclosed an innate love of beauty in his appreciation of the changing panorama of the winter landscape which stretched on every side before their eyes.

It was a picture which had an inexhaustible fascination for Nora herself, although there were times when the isolation, and above all the unbroken stillness got badly on her nerves. But she could not rid herself of an almost superstitious feeling that the prairie had a lesson to teach her. Twice they went in to Prentice. With these exceptions, she saw no one but her husband and Mr. and Mrs. Sharp.

But it was, strangely enough, from Mrs. Sharp that she drew the most illumination as to the real meaning of this strange new life. Not that Mrs. Sharp was in the least subtle, quite the contrary. She was as hard-headed, practical a person as one could well imagine. But her natural powers of adaptability must have been unusually great. From a small shop in one of the outlying suburbs of London, with its circumscribed outlook, moral as well as physical, to the limitless horizon of the prairie was indeed a far cry. How much inward readjustment such a violent transplanting must require, Nora had sufficient imagination to fully appreciate. But if Mrs. Sharp, herself, were conscious of having not only survived her uprooting but of having triumphantly grown and thrived in this alien soil, she gave no sign of it. Everything, to employ her own favorite phrase with which she breached over inexplicable chasms, "was all in a lifetime."

As she had a deeply rooted distaste for any form of exercise beyond that which was required in the day's work, most of the visiting between them devolved upon Nora. To her the distance that separated the two houses was nothing, and as she had from the first taken a genuine liking to her neighbor she found herself going over to the Sharps' several times a week.

When, as was natural at first, she felt discouraged over her little domestic failures, she found these neighborly visits a great tonic. Mrs. Sharp was always ready to give advice when appealed to. And unlike Gertie, she never expressed astonishment at her visitor's ignorance, or impatience with her shortcomings. These became more and more infrequent. Nora made up for her total lack of experience by an intelligent willingness to be taught. There was a certain stimulation in the thought that she was learning to manage her own house, that would have been lacking while at her brother's even if Gertie had displayed a more agreeable willingness to impart her own knowledge.

Nora had always been fond of children, and she found the Sharp children unusually interesting. It was curious to see how widely the ideas of this, the first generation born in the new country, differed, not only from those of their parents, but from what they must have inevitably been if they had remained in the environment that would have been theirs had they been born and brought up back in England.

All of their dreams as to what they were going to do when they grew to manhood were colored and shaped by the outdoor life they had been accustomed to. They were to be farmers and cattle raisers on a large scale. Mrs. Sharp used to shake her head sometimes as she heard these grandiloquent plans, but Nora could see that she was secretly both proud and pleased. After all, why should not these dreams be realized? Everything was possible to the children of this new and wonderful country, if they were only industrious and ambitious.

"I don't know, I'm sure, what their poor dear grandfather would have said if he had lived to hear them," she used to say sometimes to Nora. " He used to think that there was nothing so genteel as having a good shop. He quite looked down on farming folk. Still, everything is different out here, ideas as well as everything else, and I'm not at all sure they won't be better off in the end."

In which notion Nora secretly agreed with her. To picture these healthy, sturdy, outdoor youngsters confined to a little dingy shop such as their mother had been used to in her own childhood was impossible, as she recalled to her mind the pale, anemic-looking little souls she had occasionally seen during her stay in London. Was not any personal sacrifice worth seeing one's children grow up so strong and healthy, so manly and independent?

This, then, was the true inwardness of it all; the thing that dignified and ennobled this life of toil and hardship, deprived of almost all the things which she had always regarded as necessary, that the welfare, prosperity and happiness of generations yet to come might be reared on this foundation laid by self-denial and deprivation.

She felt almost humbled in the presence of this simple, unpretentious, kindly woman who had borne so much without complaint that her children might have wider opportunities for usefulness and happiness than she had ever known.

Not that Mrs. Sharp, herself, seemed to think that she was doing anything remarkable. She took it all as a matter of course. It was only when something brought up the subject of the difficulties of learning to do without this or that, that she alluded to the days when she also was inexperienced and had had to learn for herself without anyone to advise or help her.

Miles away from any help other than her husband could give her, she had borne six children and buried one. And although the days of their worst poverty seemed safely behind them, they had been able to save but little, so that they still felt themselves at the mercies of the changing seasons. Given one or two good years to harvest their crops, they might indeed consider themselves almost beyond the danger point. But with seven mouths to feed, one could not afford to lose a single crop.

With her head teeming with all the new ideas that Mrs. Sharp's experiences furnished, Nora felt that the time was by no means as wasted as she had once thought it would be. There was no reason, after all, that she should sink to the level of a mere domestic drudge. And if this part of her life was not to endure forever, it would not have been entirely barren, since it furnished her with much new material to ponder over. After all, was it really more narrow than her life at Tunbridge Wells? In her heart, she acknowledged that it was not.

To Frank, also, the winter brought a broader outlook. He had looked upon Nora's little refinements of speech and delicate point of view, when he had first known her at her brother's, as finicky, to say the least. All women had fool notions about most things; this one seemed to have more than the average share, that was all. He secretly shared Gertie's opinion that women the world over were all alike in the essentials. He had always been of the opinion that Nora had good stuff in her which would come out once she had been licked into shape. Yet he found himself not only learning to admire her for those same niceties but found himself unconsciously imitating her mannerisms of speech.

Then, too, after they began the habit of reading in the evenings, he found that she had no intention of ridiculing his ignorance and lack of knowledge in matters on which she seemed to him to be wonderfully informed. That they did not by any means always agree in the conclusions they arrived at, in place of irritating him, as he would have thought, he found only stimulating to his imagination. To attack and try to undermine her position, as long as their arguments were conducted with perfect good nature on either side, as they always were, diverted him greatly. And he was secretly pleased when she defended herself with a skill and address that defeated his purpose.

All the little improvements in the shack were a source of never-ending pride and pleasure to him. Often when at work he found himself proudly comparing his place with its newly added prettiness with the more gaudy ornaments of Mrs. Sharp's or even with Gertie's more pretentious abode. And it was not altogether the pride of ownership that made them suffer in the comparison.

Looking back on the days before Nora's advent seemed like a horrible nightmare from which he was thankful to have awakened. Once in a while he indulged himself in speculating as to how it would feel to go back to the old shiftless, untidy days of his bachelorhood. But he rarely allowed himself to entertain the idea of her leaving, seriously. He was like a child, snuggly tucked in his warm bed who, listening to the howling of the wind outside, pictures himself exposed to its harshness in order to luxuriate the more in its warmth and comfort.

But when, as sometimes happened, he could not close the door of his mind to the thought of how he should ever learn to live without her again, it brought an anguish that was physical as well as mental. Once, looking up from her book, Nora had surprised him sitting with closed eye, his face white and drawn with pain.

Her fright, and above all her pretty solicitude even after he had assuaged her fears by explaining that he occasionally suffered from an old strain which he had sustained a few years before while working in the lumber camps, tried his composure to the utmost.

For days, the memory of the look in her eyes as she bent over him remained in his mind. But he was careful not to betray himself again.

It was to prevent any repetition that he first resorted to working over something while she was reading. While doubly occupied with listening and working with his hands, he found that his mind was less apt to go off on a tangent and indulge in painful and profitless speculations.

For, after all, as she had said, how could he prevent her going if her heart was set on it? That she had given no outward sign of being unhappy or discontented argued nothing. She was far too shrewd to spend her strength in unavailing effort. Pride and ordinary prudence would counsel waiting for a more favorable opportunity than had yet been afforded her. She would not soon forget the lesson of the night he had beaten down her opposition and dragged her pride in the dust.

And would she ever forgive it? That was a question that he asked himself almost daily without finding any answer. There was nothing in her manner to show that she harbored resentment or that she was brooding over plans for escaping from the bondage of her life. But women, in his experience, were deep, even cunning. Once given a strong purpose, women like Nora, pursued it to the end. Women of this type were not easily diverted by side issues as men so often were.

For weeks he lived in daily apprehension of Ed's arrival. There was no one else she could turn to, and evoking his aid did not necessarily argue that she must submit again to Gertie's grudging hospitality. Ed might easily, unknown to his masterful better-half, furnish the funds to return to England. She had not written him that he knew of. As a matter of fact, she had not, but she might have given the letter to Sid Sharp to post on one of his not infrequent trips into Prentice. It would only have been by chance that Sid would speak of so trifling a matter. He was much too proud to question him.

But as time went on and no Ed appeared, he began, if not exactly to hope that, after all she was finding the life not unbearable, at least her leaving was a thing of the more or less remote future. He summoned all his philosophy to his aid. Perhaps by the time she did make up her mind to quit him he would have acquired some little degree of resignation, or at least would not be caught as unprepared as he frankly confessed himself to be at the moment.

The spring, which brought many new occupations, mostly out of doors, had passed, and summer was past its zenith. Frank had worked untiringly from dawn to dark, so wearied that he frequently found it difficult to keep his eyes open until supper was over. But his enthusiasm never flagged. If everything went as well as he hoped, the additional quarter-section was assured. For some reason or other, possibly because he was beginning to feel a reaction after the hard work of the summer, Nora fancied that his spirits were less high than usual. He talked less of the coveted land than was his custom. She, herself, had never, in all her healthy life, felt so glowing with health and strength. She, too, had worked hard, finding almost every day some new task to perform. But aside from the natural fatigue at night, which long hours of dreamless sleep entirely dissipated, she felt all the better for her new experiences. For one thing, her steady improvement in all the arts of the good housewife made her daily routine much easier as well as giving her much secret satisfaction. Never in her life had she looked so well. The summer sun had given her a color which was most becoming.

CHAPTER XVI

One afternoon, shortly after dinner, she had gone out to gather a nosegay of wild flowers to brighten her little living-room. She was busily engaged in arranging them in a pudding bowl, smiling to think that her hand had lost none of the cunning to which Miss Wickham had always paid grudging tribute, even if her improvised vase was of homely ware, when she heard her husband's step at the door. It was so unusual for him to return at this hour that for a moment she was almost startled.

" I didn't know you were about."

"Oh," he said easily, "I ain't got much to do to-day. I've been out with Sid Sharp and a man come over from Prentice."

"From Prentice?"

Having arranged her flowers to her satisfaction, she stepped back to view the effect. At that moment her husband's eye fell on them.

"Say, what you got there?"

"Aren't they pretty? I picked them just now. They're so gay and cheerful."

"Very." But his tone had none of the enthusiasm with which he usually greeted her efforts to beautify the house.

"A few flowers make the shack look more bright and cozy."

He took in the room with a glance that approved of everything.

"You've made it a real home, Nora. Mrs. Sharp never stops talking of how you've done it. She was saying only the other day it was because you was a lady. It does make a difference, I guess, although I didn't use to think so."

Nora gave him a smile full of indulgence.

"I'm glad you haven't found me quite a hopeless failure."

"I guess I've never been so comfortable in all my life. It's what I always said: once English girls do take to the life, they make a better job of it than anybody."

"What's the man come over from Prentice for?" asked Nora. They were approaching a subject she always avoided.

"I guess you ain't been terribly happy here, my girl," he said gravely, unmindful of her question.

"What on earth makes you say that?"

"You've got too good a memory, I guess, and you ain't ever forgiven me for that first night."

It was the first time he had alluded to the subject for months. Would he never understand that she wanted to forget it! He might know that it always irritated her.

"I made up my mind very soon that I must accept the consequences of what I'd done. I've tried to fall in with your ways," she said coldly.

"You was clever enough to see that I meant to be the master in my own house and that I had the strength to make myself so."

How unlike his latter self this boastful speech was. But then he had been utterly unlike himself for several days. What did he mean? She knew him well enough by now to know that he never acted without meaning. But directness was one of his most admirable characteristics. It was unlike him to be devious, as he was being now. But if the winter had taught her anything, it had taught her patience.

"I've cooked for you, mended your clothes, and I've kept the shack clean. I've tried to be obliging and--and obedient." The last word was not yet an easy one to pronounce.

"I guess you hated me, though, sometimes." He gave a little chuckle.

"No one likes being humiliated; and you humiliated me."

"Ed's coming here presently, my girl."

"Ed who?"

"Your brother Ed."

"Eddie! When?"

"Why, right away, I guess. He was in Prentice this morning."

"How do you know?"

"He 'phoned over to Sharp to say he was riding out."

"Oh, how splendid! Why didn't you tell me before?"

"I didn't know about it."

"Is that why you asked me if I was happy? I couldn't make out what was the matter with you."

"Well, I guess I thought if you still wanted to quit, Ed's coming would be kind of useful."

Nora sat down in one of the chairs and gave him a long level look.

"What makes you think that I want to?" she said quietly.

"You ain't been so very talkative these last months, but I guess it wasn't so hard to see sometimes that you'd have given pretty near anything in the world to quit."

"I've no intention of going back to Eddie's farm, if that's what you mean."

To this he made no reply. Still with the same grave air, he went over to the door and started out again, pausing a moment after he had crossed the threshold.

"If Ed comes before I get back, tell him I won't be long. I guess you won't be sorry to do a bit of yarning with him all by yourself."

"You are not going away with the idea that I'm going to say beastly things to him about you, are you?"

"No, I guess not. That ain't your sort. Perhaps we don't know the best of one another yet, but I reckon we know the worst by this time."

"Frank!" she said sharply. "There's something the matter. What is it?"

"Why, no; there's nothing. Why?"

"You've not been yourself the last few days."

"I guess that's only your imagination. Well, I'd better be getting along. Sid and the other fellow'll be waiting for me."

Without another look in her direction, he was gone, closing the door after him.

Nora remained quite still for several minutes, biting her lips and frowning in deep thought. It was all very well to say that there was nothing the matter, but there was. Did he think she could live with him day after day all these months and not notice his change of mood, even if she could not translate it? He had still a great deal to learn about women!

On the way over to the shelf to get her work, she paused a moment beside her flowers to cheer herself once more with their brightness. Sitting down by the table, she began to darn one of her husband's thick woolen socks. An instant later she was startled by a loud knock on the door.

With a little cry of pleasure she flung it open, to find Eddie standing outside. She gave a cry of delight. Somehow, the interval since she had seen him last, significant as it was in bringing to her the greatest change her life had known, seemed for the second longer than all the years she had spent in England without seeing him.

"Eddie! Oh, my dear, I'm so glad to see you!" she cried, flinging her arms around his neck.

"Hulloa there," he said awkwardly.

"But how did you come? I didn't hear any wheels."

"Look." He pointed over to the shed; she looked over his shoulder to see Reggie Hornby grinning at her from the seat of a wagon.

"Why, it's Reggie Hornby. Reggie!" she called.

Reggie took off his broad hat with a flourish.

"Tell him he can put the horse in the lean-to."

"All right. Reg," called Marsh, "give the old lady a feed and put her in the lean-to."

"Right-o!"

"Didn't you meet Frank? He's only just this moment gone out."

"No."

"He'll be back presently. Now, come in. Oh, my dear, it is splendid to see you!"

"You're looking fine, Nora."

"Have you had your dinner?"

"Sure. We got something to eat before we left Prentice."

"Well, you'll have a cup of tea?"

"No, I won't have any, thanks."

"Ah," laughed Nora happily, "you're not a real Canadian yet, if you refuse a cup of tea when it's offered you. But do sit down and make yourself comfortable," she said, fairly pushing him into a chair.

"How are you getting along, Nora?" His manner was still a little constrained. They were both thinking of their last parting. But she, being a woman, could carry it off better.

"Oh, never mind about me," she said gayly. "Tell me all about yourself. How's Gertie? And what has brought you to this part of the world? And what's Reggie Hornby doing here? And is Thingamajig still with you; you know, the hired man?"--The word "other" almost slipped out.--"What was his name, Trotter, wasn't it? Oh, my dear, don't sit there like a stuffed pig, but answer my questions, or I'll shake you."

"My dear child, I can't answer fifteen questions all at once!"

"Oh, Eddie, I'm so glad to see you! You are a perfect duck to come and see me."

"Now let me get a word in edgeways."

"I won't utter another syllable. But, for goodness' sake, hurry up. I want to know all sorts of things."

"Well, the most important thing is that I'm expecting to be a happy father in three or four months."

"Oh, Eddie, I'm so glad! How happy Gertie must be."

"She doesn't know what to make of it. But I guess she's pleased right enough. She sends you her love and says she hopes you'll follow her example very soon."

"I?" said Nora sharply. "But," she added with a return to her gay tone, "you've not told me what you're doing in this part of the world, anyway."

"Anyway?"

Nora blushed. "I've practically spoken to no one but Frank for months; it's natural that I should fall into his way of speaking."

"Well, when I got Frank's letter about the clearing-machine----"

"Frank has written to you?"

"Why, yes; didn't you know? He said there was a clearing-machine going cheap at Prentice. I've always thought I could make money down our way if I had one. They say you can clear from three to four acres a day with one. Frank thought it was worth my while to come and have a look at it and he said he guessed you'd be glad to see me."

"How funny of him not to say anything to me about it," said Nora, frowning once more.

"I suppose he wanted to surprise you. And now for yourself; how do you like being a married woman?"

"Oh, all right. But you haven't answered half my questions yet. Why has Reggie Hornby come with you?"

"Do you realize I've not seen you since before you were married?"

"That's so; you haven't, have you?"

"I've been a bit anxious about you. That's why, when Frank wrote about the clearing-machine, I didn't stop to think about it, but just came."

"It was awfully nice of you. But why has Reggie Hornby come?"

"Oh, he's going back to England."

"Is he?"

"Yes, he got them to send his passage money at last. His ship doesn't sail till next week, and he said he might just as well stop over here and say good-by to you."

"How has he been getting on?"

"How do you expect? He looks upon work as something that only damned fools do. Where's Frank?"

"Oh, he's out with Sid Sharp. Sid's our neighbor. He has the farm you passed on your way here."

"Getting on all right with him, Nora?"

"Why, of course," said Nora with just a suggestion of irritation in her voice.

"What's that boy doing all this time?" she asked, going over to the window and looking out. "He is slow, isn't he?"

But Marsh was not a man whom it was easy to side-track.

"It's a great change for you, this, after the sort of life you've been used to."

"I was rather hoping you'd have some letters for me," said Nora from the window. "I haven't had a letter for a long time."

As a matter of fact she had no reason to expect any, not having answered Miss Pringle's last and having practically no other correspondent. But the speech was a happy one, in that it created the desired diversion.

"There now!" said her brother with an air of comical consternation. "I've got a head like a sieve. Two came by the last mail. I didn't forward them, because I was coming myself."

"You don't mean to tell me you've forgotten them!"

"No; here they are."

Nora took them with a show of eagerness. "They don't look very exciting," she said, glancing at them. "One's from Agnes Pringle, the lady's companion that I used to know at Tunbridge Wells, you remember. And the other's from Mr. Wynne."

"Who's he?"

"Oh, he was Miss Wickham's solicitor. He wrote to me once before to say he hoped I was getting on all right. I don't think I want to hear from people in England any more," she said in a low voice, more to herself than to him, tossing the letters on the table.

"My dear, why do you say that?"

"It's no good thinking of the past, is it?"

"Aren't you going to read your letters?"

"Not now; I'll read them when I'm alone."

"Don't mind me."

"It's silly of me; but letters from England always make me cry."

"Nora! Then you aren't happy here."

"Why shouldn't I be?"

"Then why haven't you written to me but once since you were married?"

"I hadn't anything to say. And then," carrying the war into the enemy's quarter, "I'd been practically turned out of your house."

"I don't know what to make of you. Frank Taylor's kind to you and all that sort of thing, isn't he?"

"Very. But don't cross-examine me, there's a dear."

"When I asked you to come and make your home with me, I thought it mightn't be long before you married. But I didn't expect you to marry one of the hired men."

"Oh, my dear, please don't worry about me." Nora was about at the end of her endurance.

"It's all very fine to say that; but you've got no one in the world belonging to you except me."

"Don't, I tell you."

"Nora!"

"Now listen. We've never quarreled once since the first day I came here. Now are you satisfied?"

She said it bravely, but it was with a feeling of unspeakable relief that she saw Reggie Hornby at the door.

She certainly had never before been so genuinely glad to see him. As she smilingly held out her hand, her eye took in his changed appearance. Gone were the overalls and the flannel shirt, the heavy boots and broad belt. Before her stood the Reggie of former days in a well-cut suit of blue serge and spotless linen. She was surprised to find herself thinking, after all, men looked better in flannels.

"I was wondering what on earth you were doing with yourself," she said gayly.

"I say," he said, his eye taking in the bright little room, "this is a swell shack you've got."

"I've tried to make it look pretty and homelike."

"Helloa, what's this!" said Marsh, whose eye had fallen for the first time on the bowl of flowers.

"Aren't they pretty? I've only just picked them. They're mustard flowers."

"We call them weeds. Have you much of it?"

"Oh, yes; lots. Why?"

"Oh, nothing."

"Eddie tells me you're going home."

"Yes," said Reggie, seating himself and carefully pulling up his trousers. "I'm fed up for my part with God's own country. Nature never intended me to be an agricultural laborer."

"No? And what are you going to do now?"

"Loaf!" Mr. Hornby's tone expressed profound conviction.

"Won't you get bored?" smiled Nora.

"I'm never bored. It amuses me to watch other people do things. I should hate my fellow-creatures to be idle."

"I should think one could do more with life than lounge around clubs and play cards with people who don't play as well as oneself."

Hornby gave her a quick ironic look. "I quite agree with you," he said with his most serious air. "I've been thinking things over very seriously this winter. I'm going to look out for a middle-aged widow with money who'll adopt me."

"I recall that you have decided views about the White Man's Burden."

"All I want is to get through life comfortably. I don't mean to do a stroke more work than I'm obliged to, and I'm going to have the very best time I can."

"I'm sure you will," said Nora, smiling.

But her smile was a little mechanical. Somehow she could no longer be genuinely amused at such sentiments which, in spite of his airy manner, she knew to be real. And yet, it was not so very long ago that she would have thought them perfectly natural in a man of his position. Somehow, her old standards were not as fixed as she had thought them.

"The moment I get back to London," continued Hornby imperturbably, "I'm going to stand myself a bang-up dinner at the Ritz. Then I shall go and see some musical comedy at the Gaiety, and after that, I'll have a slap-up supper at Romano's. England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!" he finished piously.

"I suppose it's being alone with the prairie all these months," said Nora, more to herself than him; "but things that used to seem clever and funny--well, I see them altogether differently now."

"I'm afraid you don't altogether approve of me," he said, quite unabashed.

"I don't think you have much pluck," said Nora, not unkindly.

"Oh, I don't know about that. I've as much as anyone else, I expect, only I don't make a fuss about it."

"Oh, pluck to stand up and let yourself be shot at."--She flushed slightly at the remembrance of Frank standing in this very room in front of the gun in her hand. Would she ever forget his laugh!--"But pluck to do the same monotonous thing day after day, plain, honest, hard work--you haven't got that sort of pluck. You're a failure and the worst of it is, you're not ashamed of it. It seems to fill you with self-satisfaction. Oh, you're incorrigible," she ended with a laugh.

"I am; let's let it go at that. I suppose there's nothing you want me to take home; I shall be going down to Tunbridge Wells to see mother. Got any messages?"

"I don't know that I have. Eddie has just brought me a couple of letters. I'll have a look at them first."

She went over to the table and picked up Miss Pringle's letter and opened it.

After reading a few lines, she gave a little cry.

"Oh!"

"What's the matter?" asked Marsh.

"What can she mean? Listen! 'I've just heard from Mr. Wynne about your good luck and I'm glad to say I have another piece of good news for you.'"

Dropping the letter, she tore open the other. It contained a check. She gave it a quick glance.

"A check for five hundred pounds! Oh, Eddie, listen." She read from Mr. Wynne's letter: "'Dear Miss Marsh--I have had several interviews with Mr. Wickham in relation to the late Miss Wickham's estate, and I ventured to represent to him that you had been very badly treated. Now that everything is settled, he wishes me to send you the enclosed check as some recognition of your devoted services to his late aunt--five hundred pounds."

"That's a very respectable sum," said Marsh, nodding his head sagely.

"I could do with that myself," remarked Hornby.

"I've never had so much money in all my life!"

"But what's the other piece of good news that Miss Stick-in-the-mud has for you?"

"Oh, I quite forgot. Where is it?" Her brother stooped and picked the fallen letter from the floor.

"Thank you. Um-um-um-um-um. Oh, yes, 'Piece of good news for you. I write at once so that you may make your plans accordingly. I told you in my last letter, did I not, of my sister-in-law's sudden death? Now my brother is very anxious that I should make my home with him. So I am leaving Mrs. Hubbard. She wishes me to say that if you care to have my place as her companion, she will be very pleased to have you. I have been with her for thirteen years and she has always treated me like an equal. She is very considerate and there is practically nothing to do but to exercise the dear little dogs. The salary is thirty-five pounds a year.'"

"But," said Marsh, looking at the envelope in his hand, "the letter is addressed to Miss Marsh. I'd intended to ask you about that; don't they know you're married?"

"No. I haven't told them."

"What a lark!" said Reggie, slapping his knee. "You could go back to Tunbridge Wells, and none of the old frumps would ever know you'd been married at all."

"Why, so I could!" said Nora in a breathless tone. She gave Hornby a strange look and turned toward the window to hide the fact that she had flushed to the roots of her hair.

Her brother gave her a long look.

"Just clear out for a minute, Reg. I want to talk with Nora."

"Right-o!" He disappeared in the direction of the shed.

"Nora, do you want to clear out?"

"What on earth makes you think that I do?"

"You gave Reg such a look when he mentioned it."

"I'm only bewildered. Tell me, did Frank know anything about this?"

"My dear, how could he?"

"It's most extraordinary; he was talking about my going away only a moment before you came."

"About your going away? But why?"

She realized that she had betrayed herself and kept silent.

"Nora, for goodness' sake tell me if there's anything the matter. Can't you see it's now or never? You're keeping something back from me. I could see it all along, ever since I came. Aren't you two getting on well together?"

"Not very," she said in a low, shamed tone.

"Why in heaven's name didn't you let me know."

"I was ashamed."

"But you just now said he was kind to you."

"I have nothing to reproach him with."

"I tell you I felt there was something wrong. I knew you couldn't be happy with him. A girl like you, with your education and refinement, and a man like him--a hired man! Oh, the whole thing would have been ridiculous if it weren't horrible. Not that he's not a good fellow and as straight as they make them, but---- Well, thank God, I'm here and you've got this chance."

"Eddie, what do you mean?"

"You're not fit for this life. I mean you've got your chance to go back home to England. For God's sake, take it! In six months' time, all you've gone through here will seem nothing but a hideous dream."

The expression of her face was so extraordinary, such a combination of fear, bewilderment, and something that was far deeper than dismay, that he stared at her for a moment without speaking.

"Nora, what's the matter!"

"I don't know," she said hoarsely.

But she did, she did.

At his words, the picture of the little shack--her home now--as it had looked the first time she saw it in all its comfortlessness, its untidy squalor, rose before her eyes. And she saw a lonely man clumsily busying himself about the preparation of an illy-cooked meal, and later sitting smoking in the desolate silence. She saw him go forth to his daily toil with all the lightness gone from his step, to return at nightfall, with a heaviness born of more than mere physical fatigue, to the same bleak bareness.

And she saw herself, back at Tunbridge Wells. No longer the mistress, but the underpaid underling. Eating once more off fine old china, at a table sparkling with silver and glass. But the bread was bitter, the bread of the dependent. And she came and went at another's bidding, and the yoke was not easy. She trod once more, round and round, in that little circle which she knew so well. She used to think that the walls would stifle her. How much more would they not stifle her now that she had known this larger freedom?

"I say," said Reggie's voice from the doorway, "here's someone coming to see you."

CHAPTER XVII

It was Mrs. Sharp, making her laborious way slowly up the path.

"Why," said Nora, in a low voice, "it's Mrs. Sharp, the wife of our neighbor. Whatever brings her here on foot! She never walks a step if she can help it."

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Sharp," she called.

Mrs. Sharp had apparently come on some sudden impulse. Usually, well as they knew each other by this time, she always made more or less of a toilet before having her husband drive her over. But to-day she had evidently come directly from her work. She wore a battered old skirt and a faded shirt-waist, none too clean. On her head was an old sunbonnet, the strings of which were tied in a hard knot under her fat chin.

"Come right in," said Nora cordially. "You do look warm."

"Good afternoon to you, Mrs. Taylor. Yes, I'm all in a perspiration. I've not walked so far--well, goodness alone knows when!"

"This is my brother," said Nora, presenting Eddie.

"Your brother? Is that who it is!"

"Why, you seem surprised."

Mrs. Sharp forbore any explanation for the moment. Sinking heavily into the rocking chair, she accepted with a grateful nod the fan that Nora offered her. There was nothing to do but to give her time to recover her breath. Nora and Eddie sat down and waited.

"I was so anxious," Mrs. Sharp at length managed to say, still panting--whether with exhaustion or emotion, Nora could not tell--between her sentences, "I simply couldn't stay indoors--another minute. I went out to see if I--could catch a sight of Sid. And I walked on, and on. And then I saw the rig what's--outside. And it gave me such a turn! I thought it was the inspector. I just had to come--I was that nervous----!"

"But why? Is anything the matter?" asked Nora, completely puzzled.

"You're not going to tell me you don't know about it? When Sid and Frank haven't been talking about anything else since Frank found it?"

"Found it? Found what?"

"The weed," said Mrs. Sharp simply.

"You've got it then," said Marsh, with a slight gesture of his head toward the table where Nora's flowers made a bright spot of color.

"It's worse here, at Taylor's. But we've got it, too."

"What does she mean?" Nora addressed herself to Eddie, abandoning all hope of getting anything out of her friend.

"We can't make out who reported us. It isn't as if we had any enemies," went on Mrs. Sharp gloomily, as if Nora wasn't present, or at least hadn't spoken. "It isn't as if we had any enemies," she repeated. "Goodness knows we've never done anything to anybody."

"Oh, there's always someone to report you. After all, it's not to be wondered at. No one's going to run the risk of letting it get on his own land."

"And she has them in the house as if they were flowers!" exclaimed Mrs. Sharp, addressing the ceiling.

"Eddie, I insist that you tell me what you two are talking about," demanded Nora hotly.

"My dear," said her brother, "these pretty little flowers which you've picked to make your shack look bright and--and homelike, may mean ruin."

"Eddie!"

"You must have heard--why, I remember telling you about it myself--about this mustard, this weed. We farmers in Canada have three enemies to fight: frost, hail and weed."

Mrs. Sharp confirmed his words with a despairing nod of her head.

"We was hailed out last year," she said. "Lost our whole crop. Never got a dollar for it. And now! If we lose it this year, too--why, we might just as well quit and be done with it."

"When it gets into your crop," Marsh explain for Nora's benefit, "you've got to report it. If you don't, one of the neighbors is sure to. And then they send an inspector along, and if he condemns it, why you just have to destroy the whole crop, and all your year's work goes for nothing. You're lucky, in that case, if you've got a bit of money laid by in the bank and can go on till next year when the next crop comes along."

"We've only got a quarter-section and we've got five children. It's not much money you can save then."

"But----" began Nora.

"Are they out with the inspector now?" asked Marsh.

"Yes. He came out from Prentice this morning early."

"This will be a bad job for Frank."

"Yes, but he hasn't got the mouths to feed that we have. I can't think what's to become of us. He can hire out again."

Nora's face flushed.

"I--I wonder why he hasn't told me anything about it. I asked him, only this morning, what was troubling him. I was sure there was something, but he said not," she said sadly.

"Oh, I guess he's always been in the habit of keeping his troubles to himself, and you haven't taught him different yet."

Nora was about to make a sharp retort, but realizing that her good neighbor was half beside herself with anxiety and nervousness, she said nothing. A fact which the unobservant Eddie noted with approval.

"Well," he said as cheerfully as he could, "you must hope for the best, Mrs. Sharp."

"Sid says we've only got it in one place. But perhaps he's only saying it, so as I shouldn't worry. But you know what them inspectors are; they don't lose nothin' by it. It don't matter to them if you starve all winter!"

Suddenly she began to cry. Great sobs wracked her heavy frame. The big tears rolled down her cheeks. Nora had never seen her give way before, even when she talked of the early hardships she had endured, or of the little one she had lost. She was greatly moved, for this good, brave woman who had already suffered so much.

"Oh, don't--don't cry, dear Mrs. Sharp. After all, it may all turn out right."

"They won't condemn the whole crop unless it's very bad, you know," Marsh reminded her. "Too many people have got their eyes on it; the machine agent and the loan company."

Mrs. Sharp had regained her self-control in sufficient measure to permit of her speaking. She still kept making little dabs at her eyes with a red bandanna handkerchief, and her voice broke occasionally.

"What with the hail that comes and hails you out, and the frost that kills your crop just when you're beginning to count on it, and now the weed!" She had to stop again for a moment. "I can't bear any more. If we lose this crop, I won't go on. I'll make Sid sell out, and we'll go back home. We'll take a little shop somewhere. That's what I wanted to do from the beginning. But Sid--Sid always had his heart set on farming."

"But you couldn't go back now," said Nora, her face aglow, "you couldn't. You never could be happy or contented in a little shop after the life you've had out here. And think; if you'd stayed back in England, you'd have always been at the beck and call of somebody else. And you own your land. You couldn't do that back in England. Every time you come out of your door and look at the growing wheat, aren't you proud to think that it's all yours? I know you are. I've seen it in your face."

"You don't know all that I've had to put up with. When the children came, only once did I have a doctor. All the rest of the times, Sid was all the help I had. I might as well have been an animal! I wish I'd never left home and come to this country, that I do!"

"How can you say that? Look at your children, how strong and healthy they are. And think what a future they will have. Why, they'll be able to help you both in your work soon. You've given them a chance; they'd never have had a chance back home. You know that."

"Oh, it's all very well for them. They'll have it easy, I know that. Easier than their poor father and mother ever had. But we've had to pay for it all in advance, Sid and me. They'll never know what we paid."

"Ah, but don't you see that it is because you were the first?" said Nora, going over to her and laying a friendly hand upon her arm. Mrs. Sharp was, of course, too preoccupied with her own troubles to realize, even if she had known that the question of Nora's return to England had come up, that her friend was doing some special pleading for herself, against herself. But to her brother, who years before had in a lesser degree gone through the same searching experience, the cause of her warmth was clear. He nodded his approval.

"It's bitter work, opening up a new country, I realize that," Nora went on, her eyes dark with earnestness.

Unknown to herself, she had a larger audience, for Hornby and Frank stood silently in the open door. Marsh saw them, and shook his head slightly. He wanted Nora to finish.

"What if it is the others who reap the harvest? Don't you really believe that those who break the ground are rewarded in a way that the later comers never dream of? I do."

"She's right there," broke in Marsh. "I shall never forget, Mrs. Sharp, what I felt when I saw my first crop spring up--the thought that never since the world began had wheat grown on that little bit of ground before. Oh, it was wonderful! I wouldn't go back to England now, to live, for anything in the world. I couldn't breathe."

"You're a man. You have the best of it, and all the credit."

"Not with everyone," said Nora. She fell on her knees beside the elder woman's chair and stroked her work-roughened old hand.

"The outsiders don't know. You mustn't blame them, how could they? It's only those who've lived on the prairie who could know that the chief burden of the hardships of opening up a new country falls upon the women. But the men who are the husbands, they know, and in their hearts they give us all credit."

"I guess they do, Mrs. Sharp," said Marsh earnestly.

Mrs. Sharp smiled gratefully on Nora through her tears.

"Thank you for speaking so kindly to me, my dear. I know that you are right in every blessed thing you've said. You must excuse me for being a bit downhearted for the moment. The fact is, I'm that nervous that I hardly know what I'm saying. But you've done me no end of good."

"That's right." Nora got slowly to her feet. "Sid and Frank will be here in a minute or two, I am sure."

"And you're perfectly right, both of you," Mrs. Sharp repeated. "I couldn't go back and live in England again. If we lose our crop, well, we must hang on some way till next year. We shan't starve, exactly. A person's got to take the rough with the smooth; and take it by and large, it's a good country."

"Ah, now you're talking more like yourself, the self that used to cheer me up when----"

Turning, she saw her husband standing in the doorway.

"Frank!"

He was looking at her with quite a new expression. How long had he been there? Had he heard all she had been saying to Mrs. Sharp, carried away by the emotion aroused by the secret conflict within her own heart? She both hoped and feared that he had.

"Where's Sid?" said Mrs. Sharp, starting to her feet.

"Why, he's up at your place. Hulloa, Ed. Saw you coming along in the rig earlier in the morning. But I was surprised to find Reg here. Didn't recognize him so far away in his store clothes."

"Must have been a pleasant surprise for you," said Hornby with conviction.

"What's happened? Tell me what's happened."

"Mrs. Sharp came on here because she was too anxious to stay at home," Nora explained.

"Oh, you're all right."

"We are?" Mrs. Sharp gave a sobbing gasp of relief.

"Only a few acres got to go. That won't hurt you."

"Thank God for that! And it's goin' to be the best crop we ever had. It's the finest country in the world!" Her face was beaming.

"You'd better be getting back," warned Taylor. "Sid's taken the inspector up to give him some dinner."

"He hasn't!" said Mrs. Sharp indignantly. "If that isn't just like a man." She made a gesture condemning the sex. "It's a mercy there's plenty in the house. But I must be getting along right away," she bustled.

"But you mustn't think of walking all that way back in the hot sun," expostulated Nora. "There's Eddie's rig. Reggie, here, will drive you over."

"Oh, thank you, kindly. I'm not used to walking very much, you know, and I'd be all tuckered out by the time I got back home. Good-by, all. Good afternoon, Mrs. Taylor."

"Good afternoon. Reggie, you won't mind driving Mrs. Sharp back. It's only just a little over a mile."

"Not a bit of it," said Hornby good-naturedly.

"I'll come and help you put the mare in," said Marsh, starting to follow Hornby and Mrs. Sharp down the path.

"I guess it's a relief to you, now you know," he called back to his brother-in-law.

"Terrible. I want to have a talk with you presently, Ed. I'll go on out with him, I guess," he said, turning to his wife.

She nodded silently. She was grateful to him for leaving her alone for a time. They would have much to say to each other a little later.

"Hold on, Ed, I'm coming."

"Right you are!"

He ran lightly down the path where his brother-in-law stood waiting for him.

She stood for a long moment looking down at the innocent-looking little blossoms on her table. And they could cause such heartbreak and desolation, ranking, as engines of destruction, with the frost and the hail! Could make such seasoned and tried women as Mrs. Sharp weep and bring the gray look of apprehension into the eyes of a man like her husband. Those innocent-looking little flowers!

What must he have felt as he saw her arranging them so light-heartedly in her pudding-dish that morning. And yet, rather than mar her pleasure, he had choked back the impulse to speak. Yes, that was like him. For a moment they blurred as she looked at them. She checked her inclination to throw them into the stove, to burn them to ashes so that they could work their evil spells no more. Later on, she would do so. But she wanted them there until he returned.

She looked about the little room. Yes, it was pretty and homelike, deserving all the nice things people said about it. And what a real pleasure she had had in transforming it, from the dreadful little place it was when she first saw it, into what it was now. Not that she could ever have worked the miracle alone.

She smiled sadly to herself. How all her thoughts, like homing pigeons, had the one goal!

And how proud he was of it all. With what delighted, almost childlike interest, he had watched each little change. And how he had acquiesced in every suggestion and helped her to plan and carry out the things she could not have done alone.

She lived again those long winter evenings when, snug and warm, the grim cruelty of the storms shut out, she had read aloud to him while he worked on making the chairs.

How long would it keep its prettiness with no woman's eye to keep its jealous watch on it? The process of reversion to its old desolation would be gradual. The curtains, the bright ribands, the cushions would slowly become soiled and faded. And there would be no one here to renew them. For a moment, the thought of asking Mrs. Sharp to look after them came into her mind. But, no. She certainly had enough to do. And, besides--the thought thrilled her with delight-- he would not like having anyone else to touch them!

And she? She would be back in that old life where such simple little things were a commonplace, a matter of course. And what interest would they be to her? She could see herself ripping the ribands from an old hat to tie back curtains for Mrs. Hubbard! Certainly that excellent lady would be astonished if she suggested doing anything of the sort, and small wonder. She hired the proper people to keep her house in order just as she was going to hire her.

She found it in her heart to be sorry for Mrs. Hubbard. She had always had her money. The joy of these little miracles of contrivance had never been hers. She had bought her home. She had never, in all her pampered life, made one.

Home! What a desolating word it could be to the homeless. She knew. Since her far-off childhood, she had never called a place 'home' till now. And just as the word began to take on a new meaning, she was going to leave it! Had anyone told her a few short months ago, on the night that she had first seen what she had inwardly called a hovel, that she would ever leave it with any faintest feeling of regret, she would have called him mad. Regret! why the thought of leaving tore her very heartstrings.

What if it had been only a few short months that had passed since then? One's life is not measured by the ticking of a clock, but by emotion and feeling. She had crowded more emotion into these few short months than in all the rest of her dull, uneventful life put together.

Fear, terror, hatred, murderous rage, bitter humiliation, she had felt them all within the small compass of these four walls. And greatest of all--why try to deceive her own heart any longer--here she had known love. She had fought off the acknowledgment of this the crowning experience and humiliation as long as she could. She had called on her pride, that pride which had never before failed her. And now, to herself, she had to acknowledge that she was beaten.

They were all against her. Her own brother had spoken, only a few moments ago, of her marriage as horrible. "A girl like you and a hired man!" She could hear him now. And he had spoken of her leaving as a matter of course. He couldn't have done it if he had cared. He liked the comforts that a woman brings to a house, the little touches that no man's hand can give, that a woman, even as unskillful as she, brings about instinctively, that was all. Almost any other woman could do as well. He did not prize her for herself.

And she would go back to England and, as Hornby had gleefully said, no one need ever know. She would have a place, on sufferance, in other people's homes. The only change that the year would have made in her life would be that the check in her pocket, safely invested, might save her eventually, when she was too old to serve as a companion, from being dependant on actual charity. And to all outward intents and purposes, the year would be as if it had never been.

"In six months, all you've gone through here will seem nothing but a hideous dream," her brother had promised her. Was there ever a man since the world began that understood a woman! A dream! The only time in her life that she had really lived. No, all the rest of her life might be of the stuff that dreams are made on, but not this. And like a sleep-walker, dead to all sensation, she must go through with it.

And she was not yet thirty. All of her father's family--and she was physically the daughter of her father, not of her mother--lived to such a great age. In all human probability there would be at least fifty years of life left to her. Fifty years with all that made life worth living behind one!

She supposed he would eventually get a divorce. She remembered to have heard that such things were easy out here, not like it was in England. And he was a man who would be sure to marry again, he would want a family.

And it was some other woman who would be the mother of his children!

The wave of passion that swept her now, made up of bitter regret, of longing and of jealousy, overwhelmed her as never before.

She had been pacing the room up and down, up and down, stopping now and then to touch some little familiar object with a touch that was a caress.

But at this last thought, she sank into a chair and buried her face in her hands.

The storm of weeping which shook her had nearly spent itself, when she heard steps coming toward the house, a step that her heart had known for many a day. Drying her eyes quickly, she went to the window and made a pretense of looking out that he might not see her tear-stained face. She made a last call on her pride and strength to carry her through the coming interview. He should never know what leaving cost her; that she promised herself.

CHAPTER XVIII

"Ed drove over with Reg and Emma; I guess he won't be very long. There was something he wanted to say to old man Sharp that he'd forgot about."

"Then you didn't get your talk with him?"

She was glad of that. It was better to have their own talk first. But as it had been he who had broached the subject of her leaving, it was he who must reopen it.

"No, but I guess anything I've got to say to him will keep till he gets back. Ed's thinking of buying a clearing-machine that's for sale over Prentice way."

"Yes, he told me."

Without turning her head, she could tell that he was looking around for the matches. He never could remember that they were kept in a jar over on the shelf back of the stove. He was going to smoke his pipe, of course. When men were nervous about anything they always flew to tobacco. Women were denied that poor consolation. But she, too, felt the necessity of having something to occupy her hands. She went back to the table, and taking some of Frank's thick woolen socks from her basket, sat down and began mechanically to darn them. She purposely placed herself so that he could only see her profile. Even then, he would see that her eyes were still red; she hadn't had time to bathe them.

"I suppose I look a sight, but poor Mrs. Sharp was so upset! She broke down and cried and of course I've been crying, too. I'm so thankful it's turned out all right for her. Poor thing, I never saw her in such a state!"

"They've got five children to feed. I guess it would make a powerful lot of difference to them," he said quietly.

"I wish you'd told me all about it before. I felt that something was worrying you, and I didn't know what." There was a pause. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"If I saved the crop, there didn't seem any use fussing, and if I didn't, you'd know soon enough."

"How could you bear to let me put those dreadful flowers here in the house?" she said, pointing to the bowl on the table.

"Oh, I guess I didn't mind, if it gave you any pleasure. You didn't know they was only a weed and a poisonous one for us farmers. You thought them darned pretty."

"That was very kind of you, Frank," said Nora. Her voice shook a little in spite of her effort to control it.

"I guess it's queer that a darned little flower like that should be able to do so much damage."

That subject exhausted, there came another pause. He was very evidently waiting her lead. Could Eddie have told him anything about the news from England? No, he hadn't had any opportunity. Besides it would have been very unlike Eddie, who, as a general rule, had a supreme talent for minding his own affairs.

"How did it happen that you didn't tell me that you had written to Eddie?"

"I guess I forgot."

She waited a few moments to make sure that her voice was quite steady:

"Frank, Eddie brought me some letters from home--from England, I mean--to-day. I've had an offer of a job back in England."

He got up slowly and went over to the corner where the broom hung to get some straws to run through the mouthpiece of his pipe. His face was turned from her, so that she could not see that he had closed his eyes for a moment and that his mouth was drawn with pain.

When he turned he had resumed his ordinary expression. His voice was perfectly steady when he spoke:

"An offer of a job? Gee! I guess you'll jump at that."

"It's funny it should have come just when you had been talking of my going away."

"Very."

Not even a comment. Oh, why didn't he say that he would be glad to have her gone, and be done with it! Anything, almost, would be easier to bear than this total lack of interest. She tried another tack.

"Have you any--any objection?"

"I guess it wouldn't make a powerful lot of difference to you if I had." He could actually smile, his good-natured, indulgent smile, which she knew so well.

"What makes you think that?"

"Oh, I guess you only stayed on here because you had to."

Nora's work dropped in her lap.

"Is life always like that?" she said with bitter sadness. "The things you've wanted so dreadfully seem only to bring you pain when they come."

He gave her a swift glance, but went on smoking quietly. She went over to the window again and stood looking out at the stretch of prairie. Presently she spoke in a low voice, but her words were addressed as much to herself as to him:

"Month after month, this winter, I used to sit here looking out at the prairie. Sometimes I wanted to scream at the top of my voice. I felt that I must break that awful silence or go mad. There were times when the shack was like a prison. I thought I should never escape. I was hemmed in by the snow and the cold and the stillness; cut off from everything and everybody, from all that had been the world I knew."

"Are you going to quit right now with Ed?" he asked gently.

Nora went slowly back to her chair. "You seem in a great hurry to be rid of me," she said, with the flicker of a smile.

"Well, I guess we ain't made a great success of our married life, my girl." He went over to the stove to knock the ashes from his pipe. "It's rum, when you come to figure it out," he said, when it was once more lighted; "I thought I could make you do everything I wanted, just because I was bigger and stronger. It sure did look like I held a straight flush. And you beat me."

"I?" said Nora in astonishment.

"Why, sure. You don't mean to say you didn't know that?"

"I don't know at all what you mean."

"I guess I was pretty ignorant about women," his began pacing up and down the floor as he talked. "I guess I didn't know how strong a woman could be. You was always givin' way; you done everything I told you. And, all the time, you was keeping something back from me that I couldn't get at. Whenever I thought I was goin' to put my hand on you--zip! You was away again. I guess I found I'd only caught hold of a shadow."

"I don't know what more you expected. I didn't know you wanted anything more!"

"I guess I wanted love," he said in a tone so low that she barely caught it.

He stood over by the table, looking down on her from his great height. His face was flushed, but his eyes were steady and unashamed.

"You!"

She looked at him in absolute consternation. Her breath came in hurried gasps. But her heart sang in her breast and the little pathetic droop of her mouth disappeared. Her telltale eyes dropped on her work. Not yet, not yet; she was greedy to hear more.

"I know you now less well than when you'd been only a week up to Ed's." He resumed his pacing up and down. "I guess I've lost the trail. I'm just beating round, floundering in the bush."

"I never knew you wanted love," she said softly.

"I guess I didn't know it until just lately, either."

"I suppose parting's always rather painful," she said with just the beginning of a little smile creeping round the corners of her lips.

"If you go back-- when you go back," he corrected himself, "to the old country, I guess--I guess you'll never want to come back."

"Perhaps you'll come over to England yourself, one of these days. If you only have a couple of good years, you could easily shut up the place and run over for the winter," she said shyly.

"I guess that would be a dangerous experiment. You'll be a lady in England. I guess I'd still be only the hired man."

"You'd be my husband."

"N-o-o-o," he said, with a shake of the head. "I guess I wouldn't chance it."

She tried another way. She was sure of her happiness now; she could play with it a little longer.

"You'll write to me now and then, and tell me how you're getting on, won't you?"

"Will you care to know?" he asked quickly.

"Why, yes, of course I shall."

"Well," he said, throwing back his head proudly, "I'll write and tell you if I'm making good. If I ain't, I guess I shan't feel much like writing."

"But you will make good, Frank. I know you well enough for that."

"Do you?" His tone was grateful.

"I have learned to--to respect you during these months we've lived together. You have taught me a great deal. All sorts of qualities which I used to think of great value seem unimportant to me now. I have changed my ideas about many things."

"We have each learned something, I guess," he said generously.

Nora gave him a grateful glance. He stood for a moment at the far end of the room and watched her roll up the socks she had just darned. How neat and deft she was. After all, there was something in being a lady, as Mrs. Sharp had said. Neither she nor Gertie, both capable women, could do things in quite the same way that Nora did.

Oh, why had she come into his life at all! She had given him the taste for knowledge, for better things of all sorts; and now she was going away, going away forever. He had no illusions about her ever returning. Not she, once she had escaped from a life she hated. Had she not just said as much when she said that the shack had seemed like a prison to her?

And now, in place of going on in the old way that had always seemed good enough to him before he knew anything better, mulling about, getting his own meals, with only one thought, one ambition in the world--the success of his crops and the acquisition of more land that he might some day in the dim future have a few thousands laid by--he would always be wanting something he could never get without her: more knowledge of the things that made life fuller and wider and broader, the things that she prized and had known from her childhood.

It was cruel and unfair of her to have awakened the desire in him only to abandon him. To have held the cup of knowledge to his lips for one brief instant and then leave him to go through life with his thirst unslaked! Not that she was intentionally cruel. No, he thought he knew all of her little faults of temper and of pride by this. Her heart was too kindly to let her wound him knowingly, witness her tenderness to poor Mrs. Sharp only this afternoon. But it hurt, none the less. She had said that she had not known he wanted love. How should she have guessed it?

But the real thing that tortured him most was the fact that he wanted her, her, her. She had been his, his woman. No other woman in this broad earth could take her place.

A little sound like a groan escaped him.

"You'll think of me sometimes, my girl, won't you?" he said huskily.

"I don't suppose I shall be able to help it." She smiled at him over her shoulder, as she crossed the room to restore her basket to its place.

"I was an ignorant, uneducated man. I didn't know how to treat you properly. I wanted to make you happy, but I didn't seem to know just how to do it."

"You've never been unkind to me, Frank. You've been very patient with me!"

"I guess you'll be happier away from me, though. And I'll be able to think that you're warm and comfortable and at home, and that you've plenty to eat."

"Do you think that's all I want?" she suddenly flashed at him.

He gave her a quick glance and looked away immediately.

"I couldn't expect you to stay on here, not when you've got a chance of going back to the old country. This life is all new to you. You know that one."

"Oh, yes, I know it: I should think I did!" She gave a little mirthless laugh, and went over to her chair again.

"At eight o'clock every morning a maid will bring me tea and hot water. And I shall get up, and I shall have breakfast. And, presently, I shall interview the cook, and I shall order luncheon and dinner. And I shall brush the coats of Mrs. Hubbard's little dogs and take them for a walk on the common. All the paths on the common are asphalted, so that elderly gentlemen and lady's companions shan't get their feet wet."

"Gee, what a life!"

She hardly gave him time for his exclamation. As she went on, mirth, scorn, hatred and dismay came into her voice, but she was unconscious of it. For the moment, everything else was forgotten but the vivid picture which memory conjured up for her and which she so graphically described.

"And then, I shall come in and lunch, and after luncheon I shall go for a drive: one day we will turn to the right and one day we will turn to the left. And then I shall have tea. And then I shall go out again on the neat asphalt paths to give the dogs another walk. And then I shall change my dress and come down to dinner. And after dinner I shall play bezique with my employer; only I must take care not to beat her, because she doesn't like being beaten. And at ten o'clock I shall go to bed."

A wave of stifling recollection choked her for a moment so that she could not go on. Presently she had herself once more in hand.

"At eight o'clock next morning a maid will bring in my tea and hot water, and the day will begin again. Each day will be like every other day. And, can you believe it, there are hundreds of women in England, strong and capable, with red blood in their veins, who would be eager to get this place which is offered to me. Almost a lady--and thirty-five pounds a year!"

She did not look toward him, or she would have seen a look of wonder, of comprehension and of hope pass in turn over his face.

"It seems a bit different from the life you've had here," he said, looking out through the open doorway as if to point his meaning.

"And you," she said, turning her eyes upon him, "you will be clearing the scrub, cutting down trees, plowing the land, sowing and reaping. Every day you will be fighting something, frost, hail or weed. You will be fighting and I will know that you must conquer in the end. Where was wilderness will be cultivated land. And who knows what starving child may eat the bread that has been made from the wheat that you have grown! My life will be ineffectual and utterly useless, while yours----"

"What do you mean? Nora, Nora!" he said more to himself than to her.

"While I was talking to Mrs. Sharp just now, I didn't know what I was saying. I was just trying to comfort her when she was crying. And it seemed to me as if someone else was speaking. And I listened to myself. I thought I hated the prairie through the long winter months, and yet, somehow, it has taken hold of me. It was dreary and monotonous, and yet, I can't tear it out of my heart. There's beauty and a romance about it which fills my very soul with longing."

"I guess we all hate the prairie sometimes. But when you've once lived on it, it ain't easy to live anywhere else."

"I know the life now. It's not adventurous and exciting, as they think back home. For men and women alike, it's the same hard work from morning till night, and I know it's the women who bear the greater burden."

"The men go into the towns, they have shooting, now and then, and the changing seasons bring variety in their work; but for the women it's always the same weary round: cooking, washing, sweeping, mending, in regular and ceaseless rotation. And yet it's all got a meaning. We, too, have our part in opening up the country. We are its mothers, and the future is in us. We are building up the greatness of the nation. It needs our courage and strength and hope, and because it needs them, they come to us. Oh, Frank, I can't go back to that petty, narrow life! What have you done to me?"

"I guess if I asked you to stay now, you'd stay," he said hoarsely.

"You said you wanted love."--The lovely color flooded her face.--"Didn't you see? Love has been growing in me slowly, month by month, and I wouldn't confess it. I told myself I hated you. It's only to-day, when I had the chance of leaving you forever, that I knew I couldn't live without you. I'm not ashamed any more. Frank, my husband, I love you."

He made a stride forward as if to take her in his arms, and then stopped short, smitten by a recollection.

"I--I guess I've loved you from the beginning, Nora," he stammered.

She had risen to her feet and stood waiting him with shining eyes.

"But why do you say it as if---- What is it, Frank?"

"I can't ask you to stay on now; I guess you'll have to take that job in England, for a while, anyway."

"Why?"

"The inspector's condemned my whole crop; I'm busted."

"Oh, why didn't you tell me!"

"I just guess I couldn't. I made up my mind when I married you that I'd make good. I couldn't expect you to see that it was just bad luck. Anyone may get the weed in his crop. But, I guess a man oughtn't to have bad luck. The odds are that it's his own fault if he has."

"Ah, now I understand about your sending for Eddie."

"I wrote to him when I knew I'd been reported."

"But what are you going to do?"

"It's all right about me; I can hire out again. It's you I'm thinking of. I felt pretty sure you wouldn't go back to Ed's. I don't fancy you taking a position as lady help. I didn't know what was going to become of you, my girl. And when you told me of the job you'd been offered in England, I thought I'd have to let you go."

"Without letting me know you were in trouble!"

"Why, if I wasn't smashed up, d'you think I'd let you go? By God, I wouldn't! I'd have kept you. By God, I'd have kept you!"

"Then you're going to give up the land," she made a sweeping gesture which took in the prospect without.

"No," he said, shaking his head. "I guess I can't do that. I've put too much work in it. And I've got my back up, now. I shall hire out for the summer, and next winter I can get work lumbering. The land's my own, now. I'll come back in time for the plowing next year."

He had been gazing sadly out of the door as he spoke. He turned to her now ready to bring her what comfort he could. But in place of the tearful face he had expected to see, he saw a face radiant with joy and the light of love. In her hand was a little slip of colored paper which she held out to him.

"Look!"

"What's that?"

"The nephew of the lady I was with so long--Miss Wickham, you know--has made me a present of it. Five hundred pounds. That's twenty-five hundred dollars, isn't it? You can take the quarter-section you've wanted so long, next to this one. You can get all the machinery you need. And"--she gave a little, happy, mirthful laugh--"you can get some cows! I've learned to do so many things, I guess I can learn to milk, if you'll teach me and be very, very patient about it. Anyway, it's yours to do what you like with. Now, will you keep me?"

"Oh, my girl, how shall I ever be able to repay you!"

"Good Heavens, I don't want thanks! There's nothing in all the world so wonderful as to be able to give to one you love. Frank, won't you kiss me?"

He folded her in his arms.

"I guess it's the first time you ever asked me to do that!"

"I'm sure I'm the happiest woman in all the world!" she said happily.

As they stood in the doorway, he with his arm about her, they saw Eddie coming up the path toward them.

Marsh's honest face, never a good mask for hiding his feelings, wore an expression of bewildered astonishment at their lovelike attitude.

"It's all right, old dear," said Nora with a happy laugh; "don't try to understand it, you're only a man. But I'm not going back to England, to Mrs. Hubbard and her horrid little dogs; I'm going to stay right here. This overgrown baby has worked on my feelings by pretending that he needs me."

"And now, if you'll be good enough to hurry Reggie a little, we'll all have some supper; it's long past the proper time."

And as she bustled about her preparations, her brother heard her singing one of the long-ago songs of their childhood.

* * * * *

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Transcriber's notes

1. Punctuation has been made regular and consistent with contemporary standards.

2. All illustrations carried the credit line: "The Canadian--Photoplay title of The Land of Promise." and "A Paramount Picture." in addition to the caption presented with each illustration in the text.

3. Contemporary spelling retained, for example: dependant, indorsement, subtile, and intrenched as used in this text.

4. Table of Contents was not present in the original text.

5. Spelling corrections: page 25, "splendid" for "spendid" ("splendid defiance"). page 227, "Antarctic" for "Antartic" ("ocean of the Antarctic").

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