body is as worn out as the mind. To stay here would be--paradise--but
a glimpse of it will probably have to suffice. Its gates are well
guarded, and without are the dogs, you know."

Something in Maud Barrington thrilled in answer to the faint hoarseness
in Winston's voice, and she did not resent it. She was a woman with
all her sex's instinctive response to passion and emotion, though as
yet the primitive impulses that stir the hearts of men had been covered
if not wholly hidden from her by the thin veneer of civilization. Now,
at least, she felt in touch with them, and for a moment she looked at
the man with a daring that matched his own shining in her eyes.

"And you fear the angel with the sword?" she said. "There is nothing
so terrible at Silverdale."

"No," said Winston. "I think it is the load I have to carry I fear the
most."

For the moment Maud Barrington had flung off the bonds of
conventionality. "Lance," she said, "you have proved your right to
stay at Silverdale, and would not what you are doing now cover a great
deal in the past?"

Winston smiled wryly. "It is the present that is difficult," he said.
"Can a man be pardoned and retain the offense?"

He saw the faint bewilderment in the girl's face give place to the
resentment of frankness unreturned and with a little shake of his
shoulders shrank into himself. Maud Barrington, who understood it,
once more put on the becoming reticence of Silverdale.

"We are getting beyond our depth, and it is very hot," she said. "You
have all this hay to cut!"

Winston laughed as he bent over the mower's knife. "Yes," he said, "It
is really more in my line, and I have kept you in the sun too long."

In another few moments Maud Barrington was riding across the prairie,
but when the rattle of the machine rose from the sloo behind her, she
laughed curiously.

"The man knew his place, but you came perilously near making a fool of
yourself this morning, my dear," she said.

It was a week or two later, and very hot, when, with others of his
neighbors, Winston sat in the big hall at Silverdale Grange. The
windows were open wide and the smell of hot dust came in from the white
waste which rolled away beneath the stars. There was also another odor
in the little puffs of wind that flickered in, and far off where the
arch of indigo dropped to the dusky earth, wavy lines of crimson moved
along the horizon. It was then the season when fires that are lighted