The girl smiled wearily. Now the respite had been granted her, the question he had raised was not one that caused her any great concern.
"Oh," 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.