tactless, but I
didn't mean to hurt you. Well, one difficulty shouldn't give us very
much trouble. Why shouldn't you stay here with me?"

Agatha turned towards her abruptly with a relief in her face from which
it, however, faded again. She liked this woman, and she liked her
husband, but she remembered that she had no claim on them.

"Oh," she said, "it is out of the question."

"Wait a little. I'm proposing to give you quite as much as you will
probably care to do. There are my two little girls to teach, and I
think they have rather taken to you. I can scarcely find a minute to
do it myself, and, as you have seen, there is a piano which has after
all only a few of the notes broken. Besides, we have only one
Scandinavian maid who smashes everything that isn't made of indurated
fibre, and I'm afraid she'll marry one of the boys in a month or two.
It was only by sending the kiddies to Brandon and getting Mrs.
Creighton, a neighbour of ours, to look after Allen, who insisted on me
going, that I was able to get to Paris with some Montreal friends. In
any case, you'd have no end of duties."

"You are doing this out of--charity?"

Mrs. Hastings laughed. "Allen wrote some friends of his in Winnipeg to
send me anybody out a week or two ago."

The girl's eyes shone mistily. "Oh," she said, "you have lifted one
weight off my mind."

"I think," said Mrs. Hastings, "the others will also be removed in due
time."

Then she talked cheerfully of other matters, and Agatha listened to her
with a vague wonder, which was, however, not altogether justified, at
her good fortune in falling in with such a friend, for there are in
that country a good many men and women who resemble this farmer's wife
in one respect. Unfettered by conventions they stretch out an open
hand to the stranger and the outcast. Toil has brought them charity in
place of hardness, and still retaining, as some of them do, the culture
of the cities, they have outgrown all the petty bonds of caste. The
wheat-grower and the hired man eat together, his wife or daughter mends
the latter's clothes, and he, as the natural result of it, not
infrequently makes the farmer's cause his own. Rights are
good-humouredly conceded in place of being fought for, and the sense of
grievance and half-veiled suspicion are exchanged for an efficient
co-operation. It must, however, be admitted that there are also
farmers of another kind, from whom the hired man has occasi