The next evening Wyllard sat with Mrs. Radcliffe in a big low-ceilinged room at Garside Scar. He looked about him with quiet interest. He had now and then passed a day or two in huge Western hotels, but he had never seen anything quite like that room. The sheer physical comfort of its arrangements appealed to him, but after all he was not one who had ever studied his bodily ease very much, and what he regarded as the chaste refinement of its adornment had a deeper effect than a mere appeal to the material side of his nature. Though he had lived for the most part in the bush and on the prairie, he had somehow acquired an artistic susceptibility.

The furniture was old, and perhaps a trifle shabby, but it was of beautiful design. Curtains, carpets and tinted walls formed a harmony of soft coloring, and there were scattered here and there dainty works of art, little statuettes from Italy, and wonderful Indian ivory and silver work. A row of low, stone-ribbed windows pierced the front of the room. Looking out he saw the trim garden lying in the warm evening light. Immediately beneath the windows ran a broad graveled terrace, which was evidently raked smooth every day, and a row of urns in which hyacinths bloomed stood upon its pillared wall. From the middle of the terrace a wide stairway led down to the wonderful velvet lawn, which was dotted with clumps of cupressus with golden gleams in it, and beyond the lawn clipped yews rose smooth and solid as a rampart of stone.

It all impressed him curiously—the order and beauty of it, the signs of loving care. It gave him a key, he fancied, to the lives of the cultured English people, for there was no sign of strain and fret and stress and hurry here. Everything, it seemed, went smoothly with rhythmic regularity, and though it is possible that many Englishmen would have regarded Garside Scar as a very second-rate country house, and would have seen in Major Radcliffe and his wife nothing more than a somewhat prosy old soldier and a withered lady old-fashioned in her dress and views, this Westerner had what was, perhaps, a clearer vision. Wyllard could imagine the Major standing fast at any cost upon some minute point of honor, and it seemed to him that Mrs. Radcliffe, with all the graces of an earlier age and the smell of the English lavender upon her garments, might have stepped down from some old picture. Then he remembered that, after all, Englishwomen lived somewhat coarsely in the Georgian days, and that he had met in Western Canada hard-handed men grimed with dust and sweat who also could stand fast by a point of honor. Though the fact did not occur to him, he had, for that matter, done it more than once himself.

He recalled his wandering thoughts as his hostess smiled at him.

“You are interested in all you see?” she asked frankly.

“Yes,” said Wyllard. “In fact, I’d like to spend some hours here and look at everything. I’d begin at the pictures and work right around.”

Mrs. Radcliffe’s smile suggested that she was not displeased.

“But you have been in London?”

“I have,” said Wyllard. “I had one or two letters to persons there, and they did all they could to entertain me. Still, their places were different; they hadn’t the—charm—of yours. It’s something which I think could exist only in these still valleys and in cathedral closes. It strikes me more because it is something I’ve never been accustomed to.”

Mrs. Radcliffe was interested, and fancied that she partly understood his attitude.

“Your life is necessarily different from ours,” she suggested.

Wyllard smiled. “It’s so different that you couldn’t realize it. It’s all strain and effort from early sunrise until after dusk at night. Bodily strain of aching muscles, and mental stress in adverse seasons. We scarcely think of comfort, and never dream of artistic luxury. The money we make is sunk again in seed and extra teams and plows.”

“After all, a good many people are driven rather hard by the love of money here.”

“No,” Wyllard rejoined gravely, “that’s not it exactly. At least, not with the most of us. It’s rather the pride of wresting another quarter-section from the prairie, taking—our own—by labor, breaking the wilderness. You”—and he added this as if to explain that he could hardly expect her quite to grasp his views—“have never been out West?”

His hostess laughed. “I have stayed down in the plains through the hot season in stifling cantonments, and have once or twice been in Indian cholera camps. Besides, I have seen my husband sitting, haggard and worn with fever, in his saddle holding back a clamorous crowd that surged about him half-mad with religious fury. There were Hindus and Moslems to be kept from flying at each other’s throats, and at a tactless word or sign of wavering, either party would have pulled him down.”

“You’ll have to forgive me”—Wyllard’s gesture was deprecatory, though his eyes twinkled. “The notion that we’re the only ones who really work, or, at least, do anything worth while, is rather a favorite one out West. No doubt it’s a delusion. I should have known that all of us are born like that.”

Mrs. Radcliffe forgave him readily, if only for the “all of us,” which struck her as especially fortunate. A few minutes later there were voices in the hall, and then the door opened, and the girl whom he had met at the stepping stones came in. She was dressed in trailing garments which became her wonderfully, and he noticed now the shapely delicacy of her hands and the fine, ivory pallor of her skin. Mrs. Radcliffe turned to him.

“I had better present you formally to Miss Ismay,” she said. “Agatha, this is Mr. Wyllard, who I understand has brought you a message from Canada.”

There was no doubt that Wyllard was blankly astonished, and for a moment the girl was clearly startled, too.

“You!” was all she said.

She held out her hand before she turned to speak to Mrs. Radcliffe. It was a relief to both when dinner was announced.

Wyllard sat next to his hostess, and was not sorry that he was called upon to take part only in casual general conversation. He thought once or twice that Miss Ismay was unobtrusively studying him. It was nearly an hour after the dinner when Mrs. Radcliffe left them alone in the drawing-room.

“You have, no doubt, a good deal to talk about, and you needn’t join us until you’re ready,” she said. “The Major always reads the London papers after dinner.”

Agatha sat in a low chair near the hearth, and it occurred to Wyllard, who took a place opposite her, that she was too delicate and dainty, too over-cultivated, in fact, to marry Hawtrey. This was rather curious, since he had hitherto regarded his comrade as a typical well-educated Englishman; but it now seemed to him that there was a certain streak of coarseness in Gregory. The man, it suddenly flashed upon him, was self-indulgent, and the careless ease of manner, which he had once liked, was too much in evidence.

Agatha turned to him.

“I understand that Gregory is recovering rapidly?” she said.

Wyllard assured her that Hawtrey was convalescing, and Agatha said quietly, “He wants me to go out to him.”

Wyllard felt that if a girl of that sort had promised to marry him he would not have sent for her, but would have come in person, if he had been compelled to pledge his last possessions, or crawl to the tideway on his hands and knees. For all that he was ready to defend his friend.

“I’m afraid it’s necessary,” he said. “Gregory was quite unfit for such a journey when I left, and he must be ready to commence the season’s campaign with the first of the spring. Our summer is short, you see, and with our one-crop farming it’s indispensable to get the seed in early. In fact, he will be badly behind as it is.”

This was not particularly tactful, since, without intending it, he made it evident that he felt his comrade had been to some extent remiss; but Agatha smiled.

“Oh,” she replied, “I understand! You needn’t labor with excuses. But doesn’t the same thing apply to you?”

“It certainly did. Now, however, things have become a little easier. My holding is larger than Gregory’s, and I have a foreman who can look after it for me.”

“Gregory said that you were a great friend of his.”

Wyllard seized this opportunity. “He was a great friend of mine and I like to think it means the same thing. In fact it’s reasonably certain that he saved my life for me.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Agatha; “that is a thing he didn’t mention. How did it come about?”

Wyllard was glad to tell the story. He was anxious to say all he honestly could in Hawtrey’s favor.

“We were at work on a railroad trestle—a towering wooden bridge, in British Columbia. It stretched across a deep ravine with great boulders and there was a stream in the bottom of it. He stood high up on a staging close beneath the rails. A fast freight, a huge general produce train came down the track, with one of the new big locomotives hauling it, and when the cars went banging by above us we could hardly hold on to the bridge. The construction foreman was a hustler, and we had to get the spikes in. I was swinging the hammer when I felt the plank beneath me slip. The train, it seems, had jarred loose the bolt around which we had our lashings. For a moment I felt that I was going down into the gorge, and then Gregory leaned out and grabbed me. He had only one free hand to do it with, and when he felt my weight one foot swung out from the stringer he had sprung to. It seemed certain that I would pull him with me, too. We hung like that for a space—I don’t quite know how long.”

He paused for a moment, apparently feeling the stress of it again, and there was a faint thrill in his voice when he went on.

“It was then,” he said, “I knew just what kind of man Gregory Hawtrey was. Anybody else would have let me go; but he held on. I got my hand on some of the framing, and he swung me on to the stringer.”

He saw the gleam in Agatha’s eyes. “Oh!” she cried, “that is just what he must have done. He was like that always—impulsive, splendidly generous.”

Wyllard felt that he had succeeded, though he knew that there were men on the prairie who called his comrade slackly careless, instead of impulsive. Agatha spoke again.

“But Gregory wasn’t a carpenter,” she said.

“In those days when money was scarce we had to be whatever we could. There wasn’t much specialization of handicrafts out there then. The farmer whose crop was ruined took up the railroad shovel, or borrowed a saw from somebody and set about building houses, or anything else that was wanted.”

“Of course!” replied Agatha. “Besides, he was always wonderfully quick. He could learn any game by just watching it a while. He did all he undertook brilliantly.”

It occurred to Wyllard that Gregory had, at least, made no great success of farming; but that occupation, as practiced on the prairie, demands a great deal more than quickness and what some call brilliancy from the man who undertakes it. He must, as they say out there, possess the capacity for staying with it—the grim courage to hold fast the tighter under each crushing blow, when the grain shrivels under the harvest frost, or when the ragged ice hurtling before a roaring blast does the reaping. It was, however, evident that this girl had an unquestioning faith in Gregory Hawtrey, and once more Wyllard felt compassionate towards her. He wondered if she would have retained her confidence had Hawtrey spent those four years in England instead of Canada, for it was clear from the contrast between her and her picture that she had grown in many ways since she had given her promise to her lover. He had said what he could in Hawtrey’s favor, but now he felt that something was due to the girl.

“Gregory told me to explain what things are like out there,” he said. “I think it is because they are so different from what you are accustomed to that he has waited so long. He wanted to make them as easy as possible for you, and now he would like you to realize what is before you.”

He was surprised at the girl’s quick comprehension, for she glanced around the luxurious room with a faint smile.

“You look on me as part of—this? I mean it seems to you that I fit in with my surroundings, and would be in harmony only with them?”

“Yes,” answered Wyllard gravely, “I think you fit in with them excellently.”

Agatha laughed. “Well,” she said, “I was once, to a certain extent, accustomed to something similar; though, after all, one could hardly compare the Grange with Garside Scar. Still, that was some time ago, and I have earned my living for several years now. That counts for something, doesn’t it?”

She glanced down at her dress. “For instance, this is the result of a great deal of self-denial, though the cost of it was partly worked off in music lessons, and the stuff was almost the cheapest I could get. I sang at concerts—and it was part of my stock in trade. After all, why should you think me capable only of living in luxury?”

“I didn’t go quite that far.”

She laughed again. “Then is Canada such a very dreadful place? I have heard of other Englishwomen going out there as farmers’ wives. Do they all live unhappily?”

“No,” replied Wyllard, “at least, they show no sign of it, and some of them and the city-born Canadians are, I think, the salt of this earth. Probably it’s easy to be calm and gracious in such a place as this—though naturally I don’t know since I’ve never tried it—but when a woman who toils from sunrise to sunset most of the year keeps her sweetness and serenity, it’s a very different and much finer thing. But I’ll try to answer the other question. The prairie isn’t dreadful; it’s a land of sunshine and clear skies. Heat and cold—and we have them both—don’t worry one there. There’s optimism in the crystal air. It’s not beautiful like these valleys, but it has its beauty. It is vast and silent, and, though our homesteads are crude and new, once you pass the breaking, it’s primevally old. That gets hold of one somehow. It’s wonderful after sunset in the early spring, when the little cold wind is like wine, and it runs white to the horizon with the smoky red on the rim of it melting into transcendental green. When the wheat rolls across the foreground in ocher and burnished copper waves, it is more wonderful still. One sees the fulfillment of the promise, and takes courage.”

“Then,” asked Agatha, who had scarcely suspected him of such appreciation of nature, “what is there to shrink from?”

“In the case of a small farmer’s wife, the constant, never-slackening strain. There’s no hired assistance. She must clean the house, and wash, and cook, though it’s not unusual for the men to wash the plates.”

The girl evidently was not much impressed, for she laughed.

“Does Gregory wash the plates?” she asked.

Wyllard’s eyes twinkled. “When Sproatly won’t,” he said. “Still, in a general way they do it only once a week.”

“Ah,” observed Agatha, “I can imagine Gregory hating it. As a matter of fact, I like him for it.”

“Then the farmer’s wife must bake, and mend her husband’s clothes. Indeed, it’s not unusual for her to mend for the hired man, too. Besides that, there are always odds and ends of tasks, but the time when you feel the strain most is in the winter. Then you sit at night, shivering as a rule, beside the stove in an almost empty log-walled room, reading a book you have probably read three or four times before. Outside, the frost is Arctic; you can hear the roofing shingles crackle now and then; and you wake up when the fire burns low. There’s no life, no company, rarely a new face, and if you go to a dance or a supper somewhere, perhaps once a month, you ride back on a bob-sled and are frozen almost stiff beneath the robes.”

“Still,” interposed Agatha, “that does not last.”

The man understood her. “Oh!” he said, “one makes progress—that is, if one can stand the strain—but, as the one way of doing it is to sow for a larger harvest and break fresh sod every year, there can be no slackening in the meanwhile. Every dollar must be guarded and plowed into the soil again.”

He broke off, feeling that he had done all that could reasonably be expected of him, and Agatha asked one question.

“A woman who didn’t slacken could make the struggle easier for the man, couldn’t she?”

“Yes,” Wyllard assured her, “in every way. Still, she would have a great deal to bear.”

Agatha’s face softened. “Ah,” she commented, “she would not grudge the effort in the case of one she loved.”

She looked up again with a smile. “I wonder,” she added, “if you really thought I should flinch.”

“When I first heard of it, I thought it quite likely. Then when I read your letter my doubts vanished.”

He saw that he had not been judicious, for there was, for the first time, a trace of hardness in the girl’s expression.

“He showed you that?” she asked.

“One small part of it,” assured Wyllard. “I want to say that when I first saw this house, and how you seemed fitted to it, my misgivings about Gregory’s decision troubled me once more. Now,”—and he made an impressive gesture—“they have vanished altogether, and they’ll never come back again.”

He spoke as he felt. This girl, he knew, would feel the strain; but it seemed to him that she had strength enough to bear it cheerfully. In spite of her daintiness, she was one who, in time of stress, could be depended on. He often remembered afterwards how they had sat together in the luxuriously furnished room, she leaning back in her big, low chair, with the soft light on her delicately tinted face. By and by he looked at her.

“It’s curious that I had your photograph ever so long, and never thought of showing it to Gregory,” he observed.

Agatha smiled. “I suppose it is,” she admitted. “After all, except that it might have been a relief to Major Radcliffe if he had met you sooner, the fact that you didn’t show it to Gregory doesn’t seem of any particular consequence.”

Wyllard was not quite sure of this. He had thought about this girl often, and certainly had been conscious of a curious thrill of satisfaction when he had met her at the stepping-stones. That feeling had suddenly disappeared when he had learned that she was his comrade’s promised wife. He had, however, during the last hour or two made up his mind to think no more of her.

“Well,” he declared, “the next thing is to arrange for Mrs. Hastings to meet you in London, or, perhaps, at the Grange. Her husband is a Canadian, a man of education, who has quite a large homestead not far from Gregory’s. Her relatives are people of station in Montreal, and I feel sure that you’ll like her.”

They decided that he was to ask Mrs. Hastings to stay a few days at the Grange, and then he looked at the girl somewhat diffidently.

“She suggests going in a fortnight,” he said.

Agatha smiled at him. “Then,” she said, “I must not keep her waiting.”

She rose and they went back together to join their hostess.