“Then,” said Agatha, looking up at him, “it will be our business to prove them wrong; but I can’t help feeling that you have undertaken a big responsibility, Gregory. There must be so much that I ought to do, and I know so little about your work in this country.” She turned, and glanced with a shiver at the dim, white prairie. “The land looks so forbidding and unyielding. It must be very hard to turn it into wheat fields—to break it in.”
It was merely a hint of what she felt, and it was rather a pity that Hawtrey, who lacked imagination, usually contented himself with the most obvious meaning of the spoken word. Things might have gone differently had he responded with comprehending sympathy.
“Oh,” he said, with a laugh that changed her mood, “you’ll learn, and I don’t suppose it will matter a great deal if you don’t do it quickly. Somehow or other one worries through.”
She felt that this was insufficient, though she remembered that his haphazard carelessness had once appealed to her. Now she realized that to undertake a thing light-heartedly was a very different matter from carrying it out successfully. Then it once more occurred to her that she was becoming absurdly hypercritical, and she strove to talk of other things.
She did not find it easy, nor, though he made the effort, did Hawtrey. There was a restraint upon him, for when he first saw her he had been struck by the change in the girl. She was graver than he remembered her, and, it seemed, very much more reserved. He had tried and failed, as he thought of it, to strike any response in her. He became uneasily conscious that he could not talk to her as he could to Sally Creighton. There was something wanting in him or her, but he could not at the moment tell what it was. Still, he assured himself, things would be different next day, for the girl was evidently very tired.
The creeping dusk settled down upon the wilderness. The horizon narrowed, and the stretch of grass before them grew dim. The trail they now drove into grew rapidly rougher, and it was quite dark when they came to the brink of a declivity still at least a league from the Hastings homestead. It was one of the steep ravines that seam the prairie. A birch bluff rose on either side, and a little creek flowed through the hollow.
Hawtrey swung the whip when they reached the top, and the team plunged furiously down the slope. He straightened himself in his seat with both hands on the reins, and Agatha held her breath when she felt the light vehicle tilt as the wheels on one side sank deep in a rut. Something seemed to crack, and she saw the off horse stumble and plunge. The other horse flung its head up, Hawtrey shouted something, and there was a great smashing and snapping of undergrowth and fallen branches as they drove in among the birches. The team stopped, and Hawtrey, who sprang down, floundered noisily among the undergrowth, while another thud of hoofs and rattle of wheels grew louder behind them up the trail. In a minute or two Hawtrey came back and lifted Agatha down.
“It’s the trace broken. I had to make the holes with my knife, and the string’s torn through,” he explained. “Voltigeur got it round his feet, and, as usual, tried to bolt. We’ll make the others pull up and take you in.”
They went back to the trail together, and reached it just as Hastings reined in his team. Hastings got down and walked back with Hawtrey to the stalled wagon. It was a minute or two before they reappeared again, and Mrs. Hastings, who had alighted, drew Hawtrey aside.
“I almost think it would be better if you didn’t come any further to-night,” she said.