“You are doing this out of—charity!”
Mrs. Hastings laughed. “A week or two ago, Allen wrote to some friends of his in Winnipeg asking them to send me anybody.”
The girl’s eyes shone mistily. “Oh!” she cried, “you have lifted one weight off my mind.”
“I think,” observed Mrs. Hastings, “the others will also be removed in due time.”
After that she talked cheerfully of other matters, and Agatha listened to her with a vague wonder at her own good fortune in falling in with such a friend.
There are in that country many men and women who are 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. Rights are good-humoredly conceded in place of being fought for, and the sense of grievance and half-veiled suspicion common elsewhere among employes 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.
The two women had been talking a long time when a team and a jolting wagon swept into sight, and Mrs. Hastings rose as the man who drove pulled up his horses.
“It’s Sproatly; I wonder what has brought him here,” she remarked.
The man sprang down from the wagon and walked towards the house. She gazed at him almost incredulously.
“He’s quite smart,” she added. “I don’t see a single patch on that jacket, and he has positively got his hair cut.”