“There are some twenty dollars in my possession which your wife handed me not long ago,” she remarked in a puzzled tone.
“Still, if you had the money, you would be glad to help him—and would not regret it afterwards?”
“No,” asserted Agatha decisively; “if I had the means, and the need was urgent, I should be glad to do what I could.” Then she laughed. “I can’t understand in the least how this is to the purpose.”
“If you will wait for the next two or three months I may be able to explain it to you,” replied Hastings. “In the meanwhile, there are one or two things I have to do.”
When he left her, Agatha sat still, wondering what he could have meant, but feeling that she would be willing to do what she could for Gregory. Hastings’ suggestion that it was possible that she still cherished any sense of grievance against him because he was going to marry Sally, brought a scornful smile to her lips. It was easy to forgive Gregory that, for she now saw him as he was—shallow, careless, shiftless, a man without depth of character. He had a few surface graces, and on occasion a certain half-insolent forcefulness of manner which in a curious fashion was almost becoming. There was, however, nothing beneath the surface. He was, it seemed, quite willing that a woman should help him out of the trouble in which he had involved himself, for she had no doubt that Sally had sent Hastings on his incomprehensible errand.
Then a clear voice came in through the window, and turning towards it Agatha discovered that a young lad clad in blue duck was singing as he drove his binder through the grain. The song was a simple one which had some vogue just then upon the prairie, but her eyes grew suddenly hazy as odd snatches of it reached her through the beat of hoofs, the clash of the binder’s arms and the rustle of the flung-out sheaves.
| “My Bonny lies over the ocean, My Bonny lies over the sea.” |
The youth called to his horses, and it was a few moments before she heard again—
| “Bring back my Bonny to me.” |
A quiver ran through her as she leaned upon the window frame. There was a certain pathos in the simple strain, and she could fancy that the lad, who was clearly English, as an exile felt it, too. Once more as the jaded horses and clashing machine grew smaller down the edge of the great sweep of yellow grain, his voice came faintly up to her with its haunting thrill of longing and regret—