The horses obligingly, but without any manifestation of alarm, quickened their stride for perhaps ten paces. Then they looked at each other—seemed mutually to smile—and dropped easily back to their normal trotting-gait. In the interval, Daisy had slipped a piece of ice off the dash-board of the "jumper" down the back of Jim Burns' neck.
It was a different day from that upon which John Nixon, his wife, and Ware had driven out of Toddburn. Overhead, there was neither wind nor cloud. The wonderful sky stretched blue and bright from the black and stark groves on the east to the long expanse of snow-waves that planed away treeless to westward, meeting in a rippling line the point where earth and firmament parted on their clean, splendid and vast ways.
Daisy presently ceased from play and, under the sway of a wave of recollection, leaned back and looked about her. The sundance of her spirits, that in the old days had made summer of every season, had not been able to thaw the frost of surliness about the Nixon home. Not then; but now, it seemed, things were different. Ever since that understanding which had been arrived at in the Ware library, between Sir William and John Nixon, the farmer seemed to have opened out, changed—ratchetted back, as it were, to play over again his tune of life with a merrier lilt. The young wife had often sensed vaguely the power which proceeded from this friendly philosophy which was at the root of, and gave point and purpose to, all her husband's thoughts, words and actions; but the change in her fosterfather gave her the first striking and definite illustration of its effect.
"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity."
CHAPTER XXIV. A Western Wild Man.
"Now, what do you suppose that is?" Sir William Ware remarked, cocking his head a little as, stepping alongside John Nixon up Toddburn's main street, he approached the hotel door. The two had come into town with a load of wheat, which had been duly hoppered and weighed at the elevator. The team had been put in the livery stable, and the bell of the Toddburn House had just given intimation that dinner was "on".
"Oh, nothin'," replied John Nixon, although he smiled a little, "nothin' at all, Eng—Bill."