t year, when I'm on my way back, I'll stop, and we'll talk
it over again. That won't be long. Maybe something will turn up, too,
between now and then."

"Maybe," she said hopelessly. But she checked her tears and rose to
follow him out. At the mounting-block they shook hands again. Then he
sprang into the saddle and galloped through the yard toward the north.

"A year isn't long," she whispered to herself, as she watched him
disappear in the corn, and she went bravely back to her tub.

* * * * *

A MONTH went by,--a month of dull routine that was enlivened only by the
harvesters. Day after day she plodded through a heavy program of
breakfast, dinner, supper, bed-making, sweeping, and the care of the
chickens and pigs; her calendar was the added duties that each morning
entailed of washing, ironing, mending, scrubbing, and baking. The
promise of the colonel's son came to cheer her sometimes; but it was a
peep into the tin spice-box each evening that heartened her most. For to
her the bishop's letter was the single link between the prairie and the
longed-for campus.

Then one afternoon, as she sat churning, the dasher in one hand, in the
other a spoon that busily returned the cream frothing from the hole of
the cover, there came a second tap at the front door. This time she
heard, and ran through the sitting-room, still grasping the spoon, to
invite the new settler to enter.

He tramped in with a jocund greeting, sat down on the kitchen floor in a
path of sunlight, and leaned against the wall, smoking. "Go right on--go
right on," he urged. "Like to see you trouncing the cream. And what I've
got to say won't sour it."

She went on with her butter-making, the tall, wooden vessel firmly held
between her feet.

"Had a meeting of the school committee yesterday," he began, puffing at
his pipe slowly. "We talked over hunting up another teacher to take the
place of the one the Dutchman hired."

"She isn't coming?" asked the little girl.

"No, she isn't coming; she's going to take a school near Sioux Falls,"
he answered crossly. "I'm tired of these teachers that pretend to the
little schools away off nowhere that they're ready to take them, when
all the while they've got their eyes peeled for a school near town. So
I've proposed to the committee that we get some one about here to take
the school--some one that won't fail us, and that can handle my young
ones, the two little chaps from the