ad hardly
dared believe it at first; but as time had gone on a vague hope quickly
suppressed as unbearable had turned to suspense, suspense had alternated
with the fierce despair that precedes certainty. Certainty had come at
last, clear and calm and exquisite as dawn. She would have a child in
the spring. What was the winter to her now! Nothing but a step towards
joy. The world was all broken up and made new. The prairie, its great
loneliness, its death-like solitude, were gone out of her life. She was
to have a child in the spring. She had not dared to tell her husband
till she was sure. But she would tell him this evening, when they were
sitting together over the fire.

She stood motionless in the deepening dusk, trying to be calm. And at
last in the far distance she saw a speck arise as it were out of a
crease in the level earth. Her husband on his horse. How many hundreds
of times she had seen him appear over the rim of the world, just as he
was appearing now. She lit the lamp and put it in the window. She blew
the log fire to a blaze. The firelight danced on the wooden walls,
crowded with cheap pictures, and on the few precious daguerreotypes that
reminded her she too had brothers and sisters and kin of her own, far
away in one of those southern cities where the war was still smouldering
grimly on.

Her husband took his horse round and stalled him. Presently he came in.
They stood a moment together in silence as their custom was, and she
leaned her forehead against his shoulder. Then she busied herself with
his supper, and he sat down heavily at the little table.

"Had you any difficulty this time in getting the money together?" she
asked.

Her husband was a tax collector.

"None," he said abstractedly; "at least--yes--a little. But I have it
all, and the arrears as well. It makes a large sum."

He was evidently thinking of something else. She did not speak again.
She saw something was troubling him.

"I heard news to-day at Philip's," he said at last, "which I don't like.
If I had heard in time, and if I could have borrowed a fresh horse, I
would have ridden straight on to ----. But it was too late in the day
to be safe, and you would have been anxious what had become of me if I
had been out all night with all this money on me. I shall go to-morrow
as soon as it is light."

They discussed the business which took him to the nearest town thirty
miles away, where their small savings were invested, somewhat