He went out, and it was some little time later when Carrie found him awaiting her in a great bare room. There were antelope heads, guns, axes, rifles, and here and there a splendid cluster of wheat ears, upon the walls, but there was nothing on the floor, and the furniture appeared to consist of a table, a carpenter's bench, a set of bookshelves, and a few lounge chairs. Still, it was well warmed by the big crackling stove, and she sank with a little sigh of physical content into one of the chairs he drew out. Leland, who now wore a jacket of soft white deer-skin, stooped beside her and took one of her still chilly hands in his. It was also the one on a finger of which there gleamed the ring, and he glanced at it with a queer, half-wistful little smile.
"I hope you will be happy here. What I can do to make it home to you will be done," he said.
He stopped a moment, and, seeing she made no response, went on:
"All the way out I have thought of you sitting here. Since my mother, no woman but Mrs. Nesbit has crossed my threshold. It has been all work and loneliness with me. Won't you try to make it different now?"
He laid his other hand gently on her shoulder, and the girl who bore his name felt her cheeks burn as she turned her eyes away. A caress would have been in one sense a very little thing, but she could not bring herself to invite it then, and she was further warned by what she saw in her companion's eyes.
Leland for a moment closed one of his hard hands. Presently he smiled again and, drawing another of the chairs up, sat down beside her.
"Well," he said, "you will get used to me by-and-bye, and I only want to please you in the meanwhile. And now about Mrs. Nesbit. We'll send her away if it would suit you, and you can get somebody from Winnipeg, though I don't know that it wouldn't be better to let Jake do the cooking and cleaning as before. It's quite difficult to get maids in this country, and, when you've had them 'bout a week, they marry somebody. Anyway, that's your business. The one thing to be done is what you like, but if you could see your way to keep Mrs. Nesbit, it would please me."
It was almost the only thing he had asked of her, and she was willing to humour him in this. "Of course," she said. "In fact, I rather like her. Who is she?"
"A widow, the mother of one of the boys who drives a team for me. Wages come down when there's little doing with the snow upon the ground, and he's away railroading. I told him I'd see the old lady was looked after until he came back again."
"But how could you have done that, if I had sent her away?"