.

"My dear, I sometimes fancy I am a hypercritical old fogy!" he said,
and sighed a little, while once more the anxious look crept into his
face. "Just now I wish devoutly I was a better business man."

Nothing more was said for a little, and Miss Barrington watched the
crimson sunset burn out low down on the prairie's western rim. Then
the pale stars blinked out through the creeping dusk, and a great
silence and an utter cold settled down upon the waste. The muffled
thud of hoofs, and the crunching beneath the sliding steel seemed to
intensify it, and there was a suggestion of frozen brilliancy in the
sparkle flung back by the snow. Then a coyote howled dolefully on a
distant bluff, and the girl shivered as she shrank down further amidst
the furs.

"Forty degrees of frost," said the Colonel. "Perhaps more. This is
very different from the cold of Montreal. Still, you'll see the lights
of Silverdale from the crest of the next rise."

It was, however, an hour before they reached them, and Miss Barrington
was almost frozen when the first square loghouse rose out of the
prairie. It and others that followed it flitted by, and then, flanked
by a great birch bluff, with outlying barns, granaries, and stables,
looming black about it against a crystalline sky, Silverdale Grange
grew into shape across their way. Its rows of ruddy windows cast
streaks of flickering orange down the trail, the baying of dogs changed
into a joyous clamor, when the Colonel reined in his team, half-seen
men in furs waved a greeting, and one who risked frostbite with his cap
at his knee handed Miss Barrington from the sleigh and up the veranda
stairway.

She had need of the assistance, for her limbs were stiff and almost
powerless, and she gasped a little when she passed into the drowsy
warmth and brightness of the great log-walled hall. The chilled blood
surged back tingling to her skin, and swaying with a creeping faintness
she found refuge in the arms of a gray-haired lady who stooped and
kissed her gently. Then the door swung to, and she was home again in
the wooden grange of Silverdale, which stood far remote from any
civilization but its own on the frozen levels of the great white plain.

CHAPTER VI

ANTICIPATIONS

It was late at night, and outside the prairie lay white and utterly
silent under the arctic cold, when Maud Barrington, who glanced at it
through the double windows, flung back the curtains with a little
shi