Mrs. Hastings patted her shoulder, and then went out quietly, and Agatha lay still in her chair beside the stove. It snapped and crackled cheerfully, but save for that there was a restful quietness, and the room was cosily warm, though she could hear a little icy wind wail about the building. It swept her thoughts away to the frozen North, and she realised what it had cost her to keep faith with Gregory as she pictured a little snow-sheeted schooner hemmed in among the floes, and two or three worn-out men hauling a sled painfully over the ridged and furrowed ice. The man who had gone up into that great desolation had been endued with an almost fantastic sense of honour, and now he might never even know that she loved him. She admitted that she had loved him several months ago.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THROUGH THE SNOW.
Next morning, the mail-carrier, who drove up to the homestead half-frozen and white all over out of a haze of falling snow, brought Agatha a note from Gregory. It was brief, and she read it with a smile of half-amused contempt, though she admitted that, considering everything, he had handled the somewhat embarrassing situation gracefully. This, however, was only what she had expected of him, and she recognised that it was equally characteristic of the man that he had written releasing her from her engagement instead of coming himself. Gregory, as she realised now, had always taken the easiest way, and it was evident that he had not even the courage to face her. She quietly dropped his note—it did not seem worth while to fling it—into the stove.
She could forgive him for choosing Sally. Though she was very human in most respects, that scarcely troubled her, but she could not forgive him for persisting in his claim to her while he was philandering—and this seemed the most fitting term—with her rival. Had he only been honest, she would not have let Wyllard go away without some assurance of her regard which would have cheered him on his perilous journey, and it was clear to her that he might never come back again. Her face grew hard when she thought of it, and she had thought of it of late very frequently. For that, at least, she felt she almost hated Gregory.
A month passed drearily, with Arctic frost outside on the prairie, and little to do inside the homestead except to cook and gorge the stove, and endeavour to keep warmth in one. Water froze solid inside the building, stinging draughts crept in through the double windows, and there were evenings when Mrs. Hastings and Agatha, shivering close beside the stove, waited anxiously for the first sign of Hastings and the hired man, who were bringing back a sled loaded with birch logs from a neighbouring bluff. It was only a couple of miles away, but men sent out to cut fuel in the awful cold snaps in that country have now and then sunk down in the snow with the life frozen out of them. There were other days when the wooden building seemed to rock beneath the buffeting of the icy hurricane, and it was a perilous matter to cross the narrow open space between it and the stables through the haze of shirling snow.
The weather, however, moderated a little by and bye, and one afternoon soon after it did so Mrs. Hastings drove off to Lander's with the one hired man they kept through the winter. Her husband, who insisted upon her taking him, had set out earlier for the bluff, and as the Scandinavian maid had recently been married, Agatha was left in the house with the little girls.
It was bitterly cold, even inside the dwelling, but Agatha was busy baking, and she failed to notice that the frost had once more become almost Arctic, until she stood beside a window as evening was closing in. A low, dingy sky hung over the narrowing sweep of prairie which stretched back, gleaming lividly, into the creeping dusk, but a few minutes later a haze of snow whirled across it and cut the dreary scene in half. Then the light died out suddenly, and she and the little girls drew their chairs close up to the stove. The house was very quiet, but she could hear the mournful wailing of the wind about it, and now and then the soft swish of driven snow upon the walls and roofing shingles.
The table was laid for supper, and a kettle was singing cheerfully upon the stove, but there was no sign of the others, and by and bye Agatha commenced to feel a little anxious. Mrs. Hastings, she fancied, would stay the night at Lander's if there was any unfavourable change in the weather, which seemed to be the case, but she wondered what could be detaining Hastings. It was not very far to the bluff, and as he could not have continued chopping in the darkness it seemed to her that he should have reached the homestead already.