gone! He had glared at me, with
hate in his eyes, as he sat in that buckboard. It's all over. He has no
faith in me, his own wife!

I went to bed and tried to sleep. But sleep was out of the question. The
whole thing seemed so absurd, so unreasonable, so unjust. I could feel
waves of anger sweep through my body at the mere thought of it. Then a
wave of something else, of something between anxiety and terror, would
take the place of anger. My husband was gone, and he'd never come back.
I'd put all my eggs in one basket, and the basket had gone over, and
made a saffron-tinted omelet of all my life.

And that's the way I watched the New Year in, I couldn't even afford the
luxury of a little bawl, for I was afraid Percy would hear me. It must
have been almost morning when I fell asleep.

When I woke up Percival Benson was gone, bag and baggage. At first I
resented the thought of his going off that way, without a word, but on
thinking it over I decided he'd done the right thing. There's nothing
like the hard cold light of a winter morning to bring you back to hard
cold facts. Olie had driven Percy in to the station. So I was alone in
the shack all day. I did a heap of thinking during those long hours of
solitude. And out of all that straw of self-examination I threshed just
one little grain of truth. _I could never live on the prairie alone._
And whatever I did, or wherever I went, I could never be happy without
my Dinky-Dunk....

I had just finished supper to-night, as blue as indigo and as spiritless
as a wet hen, when I heard the sound of voices. It took me only ten
seconds to make sure whose they were. Dinky-Dunk had come back with
Olie! I made a high dive for a book from the nearest shelf, swung the
armchair about with a jerk, and sank luxuriously into it, with my feet
up on the warm damper and my eyes leisurely and contentedly perusing
George Moore's _Confessions of a Young Man_ (although I _hate_ the
libidinous stuff like poison!) Then Dinky-Dunk came in. I could see him
stare at me a little awkwardly and contritely (what woman can't read a
book and study a man at the same time?) and I, could see that he was
waiting for an opening. But I gave him none. Naturally, Olie had
explained everything to him. But I had been humiliated, my pride had
been walked over, from end to end. My spirit had been stamped on--and I
had decided on my plan of action. I simply ignored Duncan.

I read for a while, then I took a lamp, went