"And I," said Carrie coldly, "was at the settlement at the time you furnished everybody with that interesting spectacle on the hotel verandah. I don't wish to be unduly fastidious, but hitherto, so far as I know, at least you have not taken the trouble to deceive me wilfully."
Leland turned towards her with his cut lips pressed together, and his scarred face grim and hard, making a little gesture of weariness.
"Well," he said, "I guess it doesn't matter. I don't suppose I could make you think anything but hard of me."
He stopped a minute, and then laughed. "I have faced the world alone so far, and held my own with it. I suppose there is no reason why I shouldn't go on doing it."
"I believe that is, after all, what most men have to do," said Carrie. "I shall endeavour to be as small a burden on you as I can manage."
Then she turned and left him; but, as had happened on other occasions, her heart smote her in spite of her anger, for he looked shaken and very weary and lonely in the big, desolate room.
CHAPTER XIII
CARRIE ABASES HERSELF
The warm spring day was over. In that land of contrasts, where there is no slow melting of season into season, it is often hot while the last snow-drifts linger in the shadows of the bluffs. Carrie and Mrs. Annersly were sitting by an open window of Carrie's sitting-room. The sun had gone, but, as usual at that season, a filmy curtain of green overhung the vast sweep of prairie that had shaken off its hues of white and grey for the first faint colour of spring. Above hung a pale, sickle moon, and down the long slope, over which the harrow-torn furrows ran, lines of men and weary teams were plodding home. Round the rest of that half of the horizon, the prairie melted into the distance imperceptibly—vast, mysterious, shadowy, under a great tense silence—while the little chilled breeze that came up had in it the properties of an elixir.
The thin-faced woman who lay in Carrie's big chair was not looking at the prairie. She had watched the pageant of the seasons too often before, and to her and her husband they had usually meant only a variation in the ceaseless struggle which had left its mark on both of them. In that country, man has to contend with drought, and harvest frost, and devastating hail, for it is only by mighty effort and long endurance that the Western farmer wrests his bare living from the soil. When seasons are adverse, and they frequently are, a heavy share of the burden falls upon the woman, too.