at I am
going away on my own account. I must make the usual effort. I
must have something to show for myself. To take what you would
give me, I should have to be either a very large man or a very
small one, and I am only in the middle class."

Alexandra sighed. "I have a feeling that if you go away, you will
not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both.
People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world.
It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours,
if you care enough about me to take it."

Carl rose and looked up at the picture of John Bergson. "But I
can't, my dear, I can't! I will go North at once. Instead of idling
about in California all winter, I shall be getting my bearings up
there. I won't waste another week. Be patient with me, Alexandra.
Give me a year!"

"As you will," said Alexandra wearily. "All at once, in a single
day, I lose everything; and I do not know why. Emil, too, is going
away." Carl was still studying John Bergson's face and Alexandra's
eyes followed his. "Yes," she said, "if he could have seen all
that would come of the task he gave me, he would have been sorry.
I hope he does not see me now. I hope that he is among the old
people of his blood and country, and that tidings do not reach him
from the New World."

PART III. Winter Memories

I

Winter has settled down over the Divide again; the season in
which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the
fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring. The birds have
gone. The teeming life that goes on down in the long grass is
exterminated. The prairie-dog keeps his hole. The rabbits run
shivering from one frozen garden patch to another and are hard put
to it to find frost-bitten cabbage-stalks. At night the coyotes
roam the wintry waste, howling for food. The variegated fields
are all one color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the
sky are the same leaden gray. The hedgerows and trees are scarcely
perceptible against the bare earth, whose slaty hue they have taken
on. The ground is frozen so hard that it bruises the foot to walk
in the roads or in the ploughed fields. It is like an iron country,
and the spirit is oppressed by its rigor and melancholy. One could
easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs of life and
fruitfulness were extinct forever.

Alexandra has settled back into her old routine. There are weekly
letters from Emil. Lou and