"You must forgive me," said her companion. "It was tactless, but I didn't mean to hurt you. Well, one difficulty shouldn't give us very much trouble. Why shouldn't you stay here with me?"
Agatha turned towards her abruptly with a relief in her face from which it, however, faded again. She liked this woman, and she liked her husband, but she remembered that she had no claim on them.
"Oh," she said, "it is out of the question."
"Wait a little. I'm proposing to give you quite as much as you will probably care to do. There are my two little girls to teach, and I think they have rather taken to you. I can scarcely find a minute to do it myself, and, as you have seen, there is a piano which has after all only a few of the notes broken. Besides, we have only one Scandinavian maid who smashes everything that isn't made of indurated fibre, and I'm afraid she'll marry one of the boys in a month or two. It was only by sending the kiddies to Brandon and getting Mrs. Creighton, a neighbour of ours, to look after Allen, who insisted on me going, that I was able to get to Paris with some Montreal friends. In any case, you'd have no end of duties."
"You are doing this out of—charity?"
Mrs. Hastings laughed. "Allen wrote some friends of his in Winnipeg to send me anybody out a week or two ago."
The girl's eyes shone mistily. "Oh," she said, "you have lifted one weight off my mind."
"I think," said Mrs. Hastings, "the others will also be removed in due time."
Then she talked cheerfully of other matters, and Agatha listened to her with a vague wonder, which was, however, not altogether justified, at her good fortune in falling in with such a friend, for there are in that country a good many men and women who resemble this farmer's wife in one respect. Unfettered by conventions they stretch out an open hand to the stranger and the outcast. Toil has brought them charity in place of hardness, and still retaining, as some of them do, the culture of the cities, they have outgrown all the petty bonds of caste. The wheat-grower and the hired man eat together, his wife or daughter mends the latter's clothes, and he, as the natural result of it, not infrequently makes the farmer's cause his own. Rights are good-humouredly conceded in place of being fought for, and the sense of grievance and half-veiled suspicion are exchanged for an efficient co-operation. It must, however, be admitted that there are also farmers of another kind, from whom the hired man has occasionally some difficulty in extracting his covenanted wages by personal violence. That, too, fails now and then.
By and bye a team and a jolting waggon swept into sight, and Mrs. Hastings rose when the man who drove it pulled his horses up.