she sobbingly re-stammered the words:

"A ... hole ... in ... the ... ground!"

CHAPTER III.

[Illustration]

It was not yet June, but the winds blow cold on the prairie later than
June at nightfall. The moment the sun goes down, up come the chill
winds.

Sick at heart, Seth coaxed the shuddering Celia down the steps into
the cellar-like habitation dimly lighted by a single half window dug
out mansard fashion at the side.

He was silent, hurt in every fibre of his being. His manner was one of
profound apology. She was right. It was only a hole in the ground; but
he, accustomed to dugouts during the months he had spent on the
prairie preparing for the joy of her coming, had overlooked its
deficiencies and learned to think of it as home.

There were two chairs. He was glad of that. For a long time there had
been only one.

He placed her in the new one, bought in honor of her coming, seating
her deferentially as if she had been a Queen, and went hurriedly
about, building a fire of little dry twigs he had torn from shrubs
along the river that the gay crackle of them might cheer her.

As she sat looking on, she saw in this humble service not his
devotion, but his humiliation, not his great love for her which
glorified all service humble or exalted, but the fact that he had so
descended in the scale of life as to put his hand to work that she had
been used to see done only by negroes.

Her pride, her only inheritance from haughty slave-holding ancestors,
was wounded. Not all Seth's devotion, not all his labor in her behalf
could salve that wound.

As he knelt before the blazing twigs, apparently doing their best to
aid him in his effort to cheer her, something of this feeling
penetrated to his inner consciousness.

Nevertheless, he piled on twig after twig until the refreshing flames
brilliantly illumined the dugout.

From dirt floor to dirt roof they filled it with light.

The poor little twigs, eagerly flashing into flame to help him!

Better far if, wet and soggy, they had burned dimly or not at all; for
their blaze only served to exhibit every deficiency Seth should have
endeavored to hide. The thatch of the roof, the sod, the carpetless
floor, the lack of furniture, the plain wooden bedstead in the corner
with its mattress of straw, the crazy window fashioned by his own rude
carpentry, the shapeless door which was like a slap in the face with
its raw and unpainted color of new wood.

After t