always taken the easiest
way, and it was evident that he had not even the courage to face her.
She quietly dropped his note--it did not seem worth while to fling
it--into the stove.

She could forgive him for choosing Sally. Though she was very human in
most respects, that scarcely troubled her, but she could not forgive
him for persisting in his claim to her while he was philandering--and
this seemed the most fitting term--with her rival. Had he only been
honest, she would not have let Wyllard go away without some assurance
of her regard which would have cheered him on his perilous journey, and
it was clear to her that he might never come back again. Her face grew
hard when she thought of it, and she had thought of it of late very
frequently. For that, at least, she felt she almost hated Gregory.

A month passed drearily, with Arctic frost outside on the prairie, and
little to do inside the homestead except to cook and gorge the stove,
and endeavour to keep warmth in one. Water froze solid inside the
building, stinging draughts crept in through the double windows, and
there were evenings when Mrs. Hastings and Agatha, shivering close
beside the stove, waited anxiously for the first sign of Hastings and
the hired man, who were bringing back a sled loaded with birch logs
from a neighbouring bluff. It was only a couple of miles away, but men
sent out to cut fuel in the awful cold snaps in that country have now
and then sunk down in the snow with the life frozen out of them. There
were other days when the wooden building seemed to rock beneath the
buffeting of the icy hurricane, and it was a perilous matter to cross
the narrow open space between it and the stables through the haze of
shirling snow.

The weather, however, moderated a little by and bye, and one afternoon
soon after it did so Mrs. Hastings drove off to Lander's with the one
hired man they kept through the winter. Her husband, who insisted upon
her taking him, had set out earlier for the bluff, and as the
Scandinavian maid had recently been married, Agatha was left in the
house with the little girls.

It was bitterly cold, even inside the dwelling, but Agatha was busy
baking, and she failed to notice that the frost had once more become
almost Arctic, until she stood beside a window as evening was closing
in. A low, dingy sky hung over the narrowing sweep of prairie which
stretched back, gleaming lividly, into the creeping dusk, but a few
minutes