“We’ll probably come up with Gregory. I’m not sure about Wyllard.”
“He drives faster horses?”
“That’s not quite the reason. Gregory has patched up one trace with a bit of string, and odd bolts are rather addicted to coming out of his wagon. Sometimes it makes trouble. I’ve known the team to leave him sitting on the prairie, thinking of endearing names for them, while they came home with the pole.”
“Does he generally let things fall into that state?”
Sproatly was evidently on his guard.
“Well,” he rejoined, “it’s certainly that kind of wagon.”
He flicked the team again, and the jolting rendered it difficult for Winifred to ask any more questions. The prairie sod was soft with the thaw, and big lumps of it stuck to the wheels, which every now and then plunged into ruts the other vehicles had made.
In the meanwhile, Agatha and Hawtrey had found it almost impossible to sustain a conversation. It was a relief to the girl to be able to sit silent and observant beside the man whom she had promised to marry. The string-patched trace still held, and the wagon pole was a new one. The white grass was tussocky and long, and the trail here and there had been churned into quagmire. Hawtrey had packed the thick driving-robe high about Agatha and had slipped one arm about her waist beneath it; but she was conscious that she rather suffered this than derived any satisfaction from it. She strove to assure herself that she was jaded with the journey, which was, in fact, the case, and that the lowering sky, and the cheerless waste they were crossing, had occasioned the dejection that she felt. There was not a tree upon the vast sweep of bleached grass which ran all around her to the horizon. It was inexpressibly lonely, a lifeless desolation, with only the plowed-up trail to show that man had ever traversed it. The raw wind which came across the prairie set her shivering.
She was forced, however, to admit that her weariness and the dreary surroundings did not quite explain everything. Gregory’s first embrace had brought her no happiness, and now the close pressure of his arm left her quite unmoved. This was disconcerting; but while she would admit no definite reason for it, there was creeping upon her a vague consciousness that the man beside her was not the one of whom she had so often thought in England. He seemed different—almost, in fact, a stranger—though she could not exactly tell where the change in him began. His laughter jarred upon her. Some of the things he said appeared almost inane, and others were tinged with a self-confidence that did not become him. It seemed to her that he was shallow and lacking in comprehension. Once she found herself comparing him with another man. She broke off that train of thought abruptly, and once more endeavored to find the explanation in herself. Weariness had produced this captious, hypercritical fit, and by and by she would become used to him, she said.
Hawtrey was, at least, not effusive, for which she was thankful. When they reached a smoother stretch of road he began to talk of England.