Once more her laugh rang harshly through the uproar of the hail. "Oh," she said, "Charley would pour out his blood for me, and what do I owe my father and Jimmy but a badge of shame?"
She was shaking with passion and very white in face. Eveline Annersly at last realised how deeply the shame had bitten before love had come to lessen the smart of it. The girl's temperament had been, as she knew, distinctly virginal, and it was, perhaps, not astonishing, under the circumstances, that she had at first shrunk from her husband almost with hatred, and certainly with instinctive repulsion. Indeed, it was clear to Eveline Annersly that had not Leland been what he was, a man accustomed to restraint, she would in all probability have continued to hate him until one of them died. Yet the contrast between the girl who had always borne herself with a chilling serenity at Barrock-holme and the passionate woman who crouched at her side was a very wonderful thing.
Then suddenly the wind fell, and the sound of the hail commenced to die away. It no longer roared upon the shingles, but sank in a long diminuendo, drawing further and further away across the prairie. There was a deep impressive stillness as it ceased altogether.
Carrie rose abruptly. "I'm going out," she said in a strained voice. "Are you coming too?"
Eveline Annersly had little wish to go. The storm had left her shaken and unwilling to move, but she forced herself to get up, for it seemed that Carrie might have need of her. So they went out together. There was now a little light in the sky, and the bluff showed up black and sharp against it. The air was fresh and chill. Carrie, however, noticed nothing as she moved swiftly through the wheat, through the melting ice that lay thickly upon the sod. Other shadowy figures were also moving in the same direction, and there was a murmur of voices when at last she stopped.
"It's Mrs. Leland," said somebody, and the group of men drew back a little.
Then Carrie caught her breath with a sob, for the tall wheat had gone, and, so far as she could see, ruin was spread across the belt of ploughing. The green blades lay smashed and torn upon the beaten soil. The crop had vanished under the dread reaping of the hail. The light was growing clearer, and it seemed to Eveline Annersly, who remembered how the roar had suggested the beat of horses' hoofs, that instead of a brigade of cavalry, an army division, with guns and transport, had passed that way through the grain. Then something in the fancy struck her as especially apposite, and she turned to Carrie, who stood rigid, as though turned to stone.
"Look!" she said; "it isn't everywhere the same."
A man came up, and she recognised him as Gallwey. He apparently heard her, for he beckoned to them.
"Will you come forward, Mrs. Leland?" he said. "We have a good deal to be thankful for."