a month none had broken. A low ridge, streaked by flying
shadows, ran across the foreground, and waves of dust rose and fell
about its crest. Sandy belts are common on parts of the prairie, and
when they fringe cultivated land are something of a danger in a dry
season, because the loose sand travels far before the wind.

Beyond the sand-hills, the level grass was getting white and dry, and in
the distance the figures of a man and horses stood out against a moving
cloud of dust. Helen supposed he was summer-fallowing, but did not
understand the dust, because when she last passed the spot the soil
looked dark and firm. She remembered that Festing had been anxious about
the weather.

Riding on, she saw the roof of the Charnock homestead above a straggling
bluff, and her thoughts centered on its occupants. Strange as the thing
was, she had come to think of Sadie as her friend. Her loyalty and her
patience with her husband commanded respect, and now it looked as if
they would be rewarded. Bob was taking an interest in his farm and had
worked with steady industry for the last month or two. Helen thought she
deserved some credit for this; she had had a part in Bob's reformation
and had made Stephen help.

Sadie trusted her, and no suspicion or jealousy marked their relations.
Indeed, Helen wondered why she had at one time been drawn to Bob. Were
she free to do so, she would certainly not marry him now. Still she had
loved him, and this gave her thoughts about him a vague, sentimental
gentleness. It was a comfort to feel that she had done something to turn
his wandering feet into the right path.

When she reached the homestead she found Sadie looking disturbed. Her
face was hard, but her eyes were red, and Helen suspected that she had
been crying. It was obvious that something serious had happened, because
Sadie's pluck seldom broke down.

"I'm glad you came," the latter said. "I'm surely in trouble."

Helen asked what the trouble was, and Sadie told her in jerky sentences.
Charnock had started for the railroad early that morning, and after he
left she discovered that he had written a cheque, payable to Wilkinson.

"It's not so much the money, but to feel he has cheated me and broken
loose when I thought he was cured," she concluded. "He has been going
steady, but now that brute has got hold of him he'll hang around the
settlement, tanking and betting, for a week or two. Then he'll be slack
and moody and leave the farm a