should do it. It fell to Sproatly, who didn't seem quite pleased,
but he got as far as firing the chairs and tables out into the snow.
Then he sat down for a smoke, and he was looking at them through the
window when I drove away."

"Ah," said his companion, "you want somebody to keep the house straight
and look after you. Didn't you know any nice girls back there in the
Old Country?"

It was spoken naturally, and there was nothing to show that the girl's
heart beat a little more rapidly than usual as she watched her
companion. His face, however, grew a trifle graver, for she had
touched upon a rather momentous question to such men as him. There are
a good many of them living in Spartan simplicity upon the prairie,
well-trained, well-connected young Englishmen, and others like them
from Canadian cities. They naturally look for some grace of culture or
refinement in the woman they would marry, and there are few women of
the station they once belonged to who could face the loneliness and
unassisted drudgery that must be borne by the small wheat-grower's
wife. There were also reasons why this question had been troubling
Hawtrey in particular of late.

"Oh, yes, one or two," he said. "I'm not quite sure, however, that
girls of that kind would find things even moderately comfortable here."

There was a certain reflectiveness in his tone, which, since it seemed
to indicate that he had already given the point some consideration,
jarred upon his companion. She had also an ample share of the Western
farmer's pride, which firmly declines to believe that there is any land
to compare with the one the plough is slowly wresting from the wide
white levels of the prairie.

"We make out well enough," she said with a snap in her eyes.

Hawtrey made a little whimsical gesture. "Oh, yes," he admitted; "it's
in you. All you want to beat the wilderness and turn it into a garden
is an axe, a span of oxen, and a breaker plough. You ought to be proud
of it. Still, you see, our folks back yonder aren't quite the same as
you."

Sally partly understood him. "Ah," she said, "they want more, and,
perhaps, they're used to having more than we have; but isn't that in
one way their misfortune? Is it what folks want, or what they can do,
that makes them of use to anybody else?"

There was a hard truth in her suggestion, but Hawtrey, who seldom
occupied himself with matters of that kind, smiled.

"Oh," he said, "I don't know; but,