," she said, "we can think of that later, I have borne enough
to-day. This has been a little hard upon me, Gregory."

"I don't think it has been particularly easy for either of us," said
Hawtrey, with a trace of grimness. "Anyway, it seems that I'm only
distressing you." He smiled wryly. "It's naturally not what I had
expected to do. I'll come back when I feel I've quite grasped the
situation."

He moved a pace or two nearer, and taking one of her hands swiftly
stooped and kissed her cheek.

"My dear," he said, "I only want to make it as easy as I can. You'll
try to think of me, favourably."

Then he went out and left her sitting with a troubled face beside the
open window. A little warm breeze swept into the almost empty room,
and outside a blaze of sunshine rested on the prairie. It was torn up
with wheel ruts about the house, for the wooden building rose abruptly
without fence or garden from the waste of whitened grass. Close to it
there stood a birch-log barn or stables, its sides curiously ridged and
furrowed where the trunks were laid on one another, roofed with wooden
shingles that had warped into hollows here and there. Further away
there rose another long building, apparently of sod, and a great
shapeless yellow mound with a domed top towered behind the latter. It
was most unlike a trim English rick, besides being bigger, and Agatha
wondered what it could be. As a matter of fact, it was a not uncommon
form of granary, the straw from the last thrashing flung over a
birch-pole framing.

Behind that there ran a great breadth of knee-high stubble, blazing
ochre and cadmium in the sunlight. It had evidently extended further
than it did, for a blackened space showed where a fire had been lighted
to destroy it. Here Hastings, clad in blue duck, with long boots, was
ploughing, plodding behind his horses, which stopped now and then when
the share jarred against a patch of still frozen soil. Further on two
other men silhouetted in blue against the whitened grass drove spans of
slowly moving oxen that hauled big breaker ploughs, and the lines of
clods that lengthened behind them gleamed in the sunlight a rich
chocolate-brown. Beyond them the wilderness ran unbroken to the
horizon.

Agatha gazed at it all vacantly, but the newness and strangeness of it
reacted upon her. She felt very desolate and lonely, and by and bye
remembered that she had still to grapple with a practical difficulty.
She could