Agatha winced at this. It was, no doubt, true, but it seemed horribly petty and commonplace. His comprehension stopped at such details as these, and he had given her no credit for the courage which would have made light of bodily discomfort.

"Do you think--that--would have mattered? We were both very young then, and we could have faced our troubles and grown up together. Now we're not the same. You let me grow up alone."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'Do you think--that--would have mattered?'"]

Hawtrey spread his hands out. "I haven't changed."

He contented himself with that, and Agatha grew more resolute. There was no spark of imagination in him, scarcely even a spark of the pa.s.sion which, if it had been strong enough, might have swept her away in spite of her shrinking. He was a man of comely presence, whimsical, and quick, as she remembered, at light badinage, but when there was a crisis to be grappled with he somehow failed. His graces were on the surface. There was no depth in him.

"Aggy," he added humbly, when he should have been dominantly forceful, "it is only a question of a little time. You will get used to me."

"Then," and the girl clutched at the chance of respite, "give me six months from to-day. It isn't very much to ask, Gregory."

The man wrinkled his brows. "It's a great deal," he answered slowly.

"I seem to feel that we shall drift further and further apart if once I let you go."

"Then you feel that we have drifted a little already?"

"I don't know what has come over you, Aggy, but there has been a change. I'm what I was, and I want to keep you."

Agatha rose and turned towards him rather white in face. "Then if you are wise you will not urge me now."

Hawtrey met her gaze for a moment, and then made a sign of acquiescence as he turned his eyes away. He recognised that this was a new Agatha, one whose will was stronger than his. Yet he was half-astonished that he had yielded so readily.

"Well," he said, "if it must be, I can only give way to you, but I must be free to come over here whenever I wish." Then a thought seemed to strike him. "But you may have to go away," he added, with sudden concern. "If I am to wait six months, what are you to do in the meanwhile?"

The girl smiled wearily. Now the respite had been granted her, the question he had raised was not one that caused her any great concern.

"Oh," she said, "we can think of that later, I have borne enough to-day. This has been a little hard upon me, Gregory."

"I don't think it has been particularly easy for either of us," said Hawtrey, with a trace of grimness. "Anyway, it seems that I'm only distressing you." He smiled wryly. "It's naturally not what I had expected to do. I'll come back when I feel I've quite grasped the situation."

He moved a pace or two nearer, and taking one of her hands swiftly stooped and kissed her cheek.

"My dear," he said, "I only want to make it as easy as I can. You'll try to think of me, favourably."

Then he went out and left her sitting with a troubled face beside the open window. A little warm breeze swept into the almost empty room, and outside a blaze of sunshine rested on the prairie. It was torn up with wheel ruts about the house, for the wooden building rose abruptly without fence or garden from the waste of whitened gra.s.s. Close to it there stood a birch-log barn or stables, its sides curiously ridged and furrowed where the trunks were laid on one another, roofed with wooden shingles that had warped into hollows here and there. Further away there rose another long building, apparently of sod, and a great shapeless yellow mound with a domed top towered behind the latter. It was most unlike a trim English rick, besides being bigger, and Agatha wondered what it could be. As a matter of fact, it was a not uncommon form of granary, the straw from the last thrashing flung over a birch-pole framing.

Behind that there ran a great breadth of knee-high stubble, blazing ochre and cadmium in the sunlight. It had evidently extended further than it did, for a blackened s.p.a.ce showed where a fire had been lighted to destroy it. Here Hastings, clad in blue duck, with long boots, was ploughing, plodding behind his horses, which stopped now and then when the share jarred against a patch of still frozen soil. Further on two other men silhouetted in blue against the whitened gra.s.s drove spans of slowly moving oxen that hauled big breaker ploughs, and the lines of clods that lengthened behind them gleamed in the sunlight a rich chocolate-brown. Beyond them the wilderness ran unbroken to the horizon.

Agatha gazed at it all vacantly, but the newness and strangeness of it reacted upon her. She felt very desolate and lonely, and by and bye remembered that she had still to grapple with a practical difficulty.

She could not stay with Mrs. Hastings indefinitely, and she had not the least notion where to go or what she was to do. She was leaning back in her chair wearily with half-closed eyes when her hostess came in and looked at her with a smile that suggested comprehension. Mrs. Hastings was thin, and seemed a trifle worn, but she had shrewd, kindly eyes.

Just then she wore a plain print dress which was dusted here and there with flour.

"So you have sent him away?" she said.

It was borne in upon Agatha that she could be candid with this woman who she fancied had already guessed the truth.

"Yes," she said, "for six months. That is, we are not to decide on anything until they have expired. I felt we must get used to each other. It seemed best."

"To you. Did it seem best to Gregory?"

A flush crept into Agatha's face. Though his acquiescence had been a relief to her, she felt that after all he might have made a more vigorous protest.

"He gave in to me," she said.

Mrs. Hastings looked thoughtful. "Well," she said, "I believe you were wise, but that opens up another question. What are you going to do in the meanwhile?"

"I don't know," said Agatha wearily. "I suppose I shall have to go away--to Winnipeg, most probably. I could teach, I think."

"How are you and Gregory to get used to each other if you go away?"

Agatha made a little helpless gesture. "I hadn't looked at it in that light."

"Are you very anxious to get used to him?"

Agatha shrank from the question; but there was a constraining kindliness in her companion's eyes.

"I daren't quite think about it yet. I mean to try. I must try. I seem to be playing an utterly contemptible, selfish part, but I could not marry him--now!"

Her hostess quietly crossed the room, and sat down by her side.

"My dear," she said, "as I told you, I think you are doing right, and in some respects I believe I know how you feel. Everybody prophesied disaster when I came out to join Allen from a sheltered home in Montreal, and at the beginning my life here was not easy to me. It was all so different, and there were times when I was afraid, and my heart was horribly heavy. If it hadn't been for Allen I think I should have given in and broken down. He understood, however. He never failed me."

Agatha's eyes grew misty, and she turned her head away.

"Yes," she said, "that would make it wonderfully easier."

"You must forgive me," said her companion. "It was tactless, but I didn't mean to hurt you. Well, one difficulty shouldn't give us very much trouble. Why shouldn't you stay here with me?"

Agatha turned towards her abruptly with a relief in her face from which it, however, faded again. She liked this woman, and she liked her husband, but she remembered that she had no claim on them.

"Oh," she said, "it is out of the question."

"Wait a little. I'm proposing to give you quite as much as you will probably care to do. There are my two little girls to teach, and I think they have rather taken to you. I can scarcely find a minute to do it myself, and, as you have seen, there is a piano which has after all only a few of the notes broken. Besides, we have only one Scandinavian maid who smashes everything that isn't made of indurated fibre, and I'm afraid she'll marry one of the boys in a month or two.

It was only by sending the kiddies to Brandon and getting Mrs.

Creighton, a neighbour of ours, to look after Allen, who insisted on me going, that I was able to get to Paris with some Montreal friends. In any case, you'd have no end of duties."

"You are doing this out of--charity?"

Mrs. Hastings laughed. "Allen wrote some friends of his in Winnipeg to send me anybody out a week or two ago."

The girl's eyes shone mistily. "Oh," she said, "you have lifted one weight off my mind."

"I think," said Mrs. Hastings, "the others will also be removed in due time."

Then she talked cheerfully of other matters, and Agatha listened to her with a vague wonder, which was, however, not altogether justified, at her good fortune in falling in with such a friend, for there are in that country a good many men and women who resemble this farmer's wife in one respect. Unfettered by conventions they stretch out an open hand to the stranger and the outcast. Toil has brought them charity in place of hardness, and still retaining, as some of them do, the culture of the cities, they have outgrown all the petty bonds of caste. The wheat-grower and the hired man eat together, his wife or daughter mends the latter's clothes, and he, as the natural result of it, not infrequently makes the farmer's cause his own. Rights are good-humouredly conceded in place of being fought for, and the sense of grievance and half-veiled suspicion are exchanged for an efficient co-operation. It must, however, be admitted that there are also farmers of another kind, from whom the hired man has occasionally some difficulty in extracting his covenanted wages by personal violence.

That, too, fails now and then.