It was two days later when Agatha, coming back from a stroll across the prairie with the two little girls, found Mrs. Hastings awaiting her at the homestead door.

“I’ll take the kiddies. Harry Wyllard’s here, and he seems quite anxious to see you, though I don’t know what he wants,” she said.

She flashed a searching glance at the girl, whose face, however, remained impassive. It was not often that Agatha’s composure broke down.

“Don’t wait,” she added, “you had better go in this minute. Allen has been arguing with him the last half-hour, and can’t get any sense into him. It seems to me the man’s crazy; but he might, perhaps, listen to you.”

“I think that is scarcely likely,” replied Agatha.

Mrs. Hastings made a sign of impatience. “Then,” she rejoined, “it’s a pity. Anyway, if he speaks to you about his project you can tell him that it’s altogether unreasonable.”

She drew aside, and Agatha walked into the room in which she had had her painful interview with Gregory. Wyllard, who rose as she came in, stood quietly watching her.

“Nellie Hastings or her husband has been telling you what they think of my idea?” he said questioningly.

“Yes,” Agatha answered. “Their opinion evidently hasn’t much weight with you.”

“Haven’t you a message for me?” he asked. “You were sent to denounce my folly—and you can’t do it. If you trusted your own impulses you would give me your benediction instead.” He smiled down at her.

Agatha, who was troubled with a sense of regret, saw a suggestive wistfulness in his face.

“No,” she said slowly, “I can’t denounce your folly, as they call your decision to go North. For one reason, I have no right of any kind to force my views on you.”

“You told Mrs. Hastings that?”

It seemed an unwarranted question, but the girl admitted the truth frankly.

“In one sense I did. I suggested that there was no reason why you should listen to me.”

Wyllard smiled again. “Nellie and her husband are good friends of mine, but sometimes our friends are a little too officious. Anyway, it doesn’t count. If you had had that right, you would have told me to go.”

Agatha felt the warm blood rise to her cheeks. It seemed to her that he had paid her a great and sincere compliment in taking it for granted that if she had loved him she would still have bidden him undertake his perilous duty.

“Ah,” she said, “I don’t know. Perhaps I should not have been brave enough.”

It was not a judicious answer. She realized that, but she felt that she must speak with unhesitating candor.

“After all,” she added, “can you be quite sure that this is your duty?”

Wyllard kept his eye on her. “No,” he said, “I can’t. In fact, when I sit down to think I can see at least a dozen reasons why it doesn’t concern me. In a case of this kind that’s always easy. It’s just borne in upon me—I don’t know how—that I have to go.”

Agatha crossed to the window and sat down. He leaned upon a chairback looking at her gravely.

“Well,” he continued, “we’ll go on a little further. It seems better that I should make what’s in my mind quite clear to you. You see, Captain Dampier and I start in a week.”

Agatha was conscious of a shock of dismay.

“We may be back before the winter, but it’s also quite likely that we may be ice-nipped before our work is through, and in that case it would be a year at least before we reach Vancouver,” he went on steadily after a little pause. “In fact, there’s a certain probability that all of us may leave our bones up there. Now, there’s a thing I must ask you. Is it only a passing trouble that stands between you and Gregory? Are you still fond of him?”

Agatha’s heart beat fast. It would have been a relief to assure herself that she was as fond of Gregory as she had been, but she could not do it.

“That is a point on which I cannot answer you,” she declared in a voice that trembled.

“We’ll let it go at that. The fact that Gregory sent me over for you implied a certain obligation. How far events have cleared me of it I don’t know—and you don’t seem willing to tell me. But I believe there is now less cause than there was for me to thrust my own wishes into the background, and, as I start in another week, the situation has forced my hand. I can’t wait as I had meant to do, and it would be a vast relief to know that I had made your future safer than it is before I go. Will you marry me at the settlement the morning I start?”

Half-conscious, as she was, of the unselfishness which had prompted this suggestion, Agatha faced him in hot anger.

“Can you suppose for a moment that I would agree to that?” she asked.

“Wait,” he pleaded. “Try to look at it calmly. First of all, I want you. You know that—though you have never shown me any tenderness, you can’t doubt it—but I can’t stay to win your liking. I must go away. As things stand, your future is uncertain; but as my wife it would, at least, be safe. However badly the man I leave in charge of the Range may manage there would be something saved out of the wreck, and I would like to make that something yours. As I said, I may be away a year, perhaps eighteen months, and I may never come back. If I don’t return the fact that you would bear my name could cause you no great trouble. It would lay no restraint on you in any way.”

Agatha looked him in the eyes, and spoke with quick intensity. “We can’t contemplate your not coming back. It’s unthinkable.”

“Thank you,” said Wyllard, still with the grave quietness she wondered at. “Then I’m not sure that my turning up again would greatly complicate the situation. There would, at least, be one way out of the difficulty. You wouldn’t find your position intolerable if I could make you fond of me.”

Agatha broke into a little, high-strung laugh that was near to weeping.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, “aren’t you taking too much for granted? Am I really to believe you are making this fantastic offer seriously? Do you suppose I would marry you—for your possessions?”

“My proposition does sound cold-blooded. Perhaps it is in one way, but you wouldn’t always find me so practical and calculating. Just now, because my hand is forced, I am only anticipating things. If I live, you will some day have to choose between Gregory and me. In that case he must hold his own if he can.”

“Against what you have offered me?” she flung the question at him.

He looked at her with his face set.

“I expect I deserved that. I wanted to make you safe. It’s the most pressing difficulty.”

The resentment was still in the girl’s eyes.

“So far as I am concerned, you seem to believe it is the only difficulty. Oh, do you imagine that an offer of the kind you have made me, made as you have made it, would lead anyone to love you?”

Wyllard spoke with a new tenderness. “When I first saw your picture, and when I saw you afterwards, I loved your gracious quietness. Now you seem to have lost your repose and I love you better as you are. There is one thing, Agatha, that I must ask again, and it’s your duty to tell me. Are you fonder of Gregory than you feel you ever could be of me?”

Agatha’s eyes fell. She felt that she could not look at him nor could she answer his question honestly as she desired to answer it.

“At least I am bound to him until he releases me.”

“Ah!” responded Wyllard, “that is what I was most afraid of. All along it hampered me, and in it you have the reason for my cold, business-like talk to-day. It is another reason why I should go away.”

“For fear that you should tempt me from my duty?”

Wyllard’s expression changed, and there crept into his eyes a gleam of the passion that he was smothering.

“My dear,” he said, “I seem to know that I could make you break faith with that man. You belong to me. For three years you have been everywhere with me. Now I must go away and Gregory will have a clear field, but the probability is in favor of my coming back again, and then, if he has failed to make the most of his chance, I’ll enforce my claim.”

He seized both her hands, holding them firmly.

“That is my last word. At least, you will let me think that when I go up yonder into the mists and snow I shall take your good wishes for my success away with me.”

She lifted her flushed face, and once looked him steadily in the eyes.

“My good wishes are yours, most fervently,” she replied. “It would be intolerable that you should fail.”

He looked sad as he let her hands fall. “After all,” he said, “one can do only what one can.”

He went away without another glance at her.

Not long afterwards Mrs. Hastings, who was possessed of a reasonable measure of curiosity, found occasion to enter the room.

“You have said something to trouble Harry?” she began.

“I’m not sure he’s greatly troubled. In any case, I told him I would not marry him,” Agatha answered.

Mrs. Hastings gave her a glance of compassionate astonishment.

“Oh,” she said, “he’s mad. Did he tell you that he means to leave Gregory in charge of Willow Range?”

Agatha’s face showed her surprise, but Mrs. Hastings nodded reassuringly. “It’s a fact,” she asserted. “He asked Gregory to meet him here to save time, and”—she turned towards the window—“there’s his wagon now.”

She went to the door, and then turned again.

“Is there any blood—red blood we will call it—or even common-sense in you? You could have kept Harry here if you had wanted to do so?”

“No,” replied Agatha, “I don’t think I could. I’m not even sure that, if I’d had the right, I would have done it. He recognized that.”

Mrs. Hastings looked at her dubiously. “Then,” she commented, “you have either a somewhat extraordinary character, or you are in love with him in a way that is beyond most of us. In any case, I can’t help feeling that you will be sorry some day for what you have done.”

Next moment the door closed with a bang, and Agatha was left alone to analyze her sensations during her interview with Wyllard. She found the task difficult, for her memory of what had happened was confused and fragmentary. She had certainly been angry with Wyllard. It was humiliating that he had evidently taken it for granted that the greater security she would enjoy as his wife would have preponderance of weight with her, yet there was a certain satisfaction in the reflection that to leave her dependent upon Mrs. Hastings caused him concern. For another thing, his reserve had been perplexing, and it was borne in upon her that it would have cost her a more determined effort to withstand him had he spoken with fire and passion.

If the man had been fervently in love with her, why had he not insisted on that fact? she asked herself. Could it have been because, with the fantastic generosity of which he was evidently capable, he had been willing to leave his friend unhandicapped with an open field? That seemed too much to expect from any man. Then there was the other explanation—that he preferred to leave the choice wholly to her, lest he should tempt her too strongly to break faith with Gregory. This idea brought the blood to her face since it suggested that he believed that he had merely to urge her sufficiently in order to make her yield. There was, it seemed, no satisfactory explanation at all! The one fact remained that he had made her a dispassionate offer of marriage, and had left her to decide.

Wyllard could not have made the matter very much clearer. Shrewdly practical, as he was in some respects, there were times when he acted blindly, merely doing without reasoning what he felt sub-consciously was right. This had more than once involved him in disaster, but in the long run the failures of such men often prove better than the dictates of calculating wisdom.

Agatha found a momentary relief from her thoughts as she watched Hawtrey get down from his wagon and approach the house. The change in him was plainer than it had ever been. It may have been because she had now a standard of comparison that it was so apparent. He was tall and well-favored, and he moved with a jaunty yet not ungraceful swing; but it seemed to her that his bearing was merely the result of an empty self-sufficiency. There was, she felt, no force behind it. Gregory was smiling, and there was certainly a hint of sensuality in his face which suggested that the man might sink into a self-indulgent coarseness. Agatha remembered that she was still pledged to him and determinedly brushed these thoughts aside.

Hawtrey entered a room where, with a paper in his hand, Wyllard sat awaiting him.

“I asked you to drive over here because it would save time,” said Wyllard. “I have to go in to the railroad at once. Here’s a draft of the scheme I suggested. You had better tell me if there’s anything you’re not quite satisfied with.”

He threw the paper on the table, and Hawtrey took it up.

“I’m to farm and generally manage the Range on your behalf,” said Hawtrey after reading its contents. “My percentage to be deducted after harvest. I’m empowered to sell out grain or horses as appears advisable, and to have the use of teams and implements for my own place when occasion requires it.”

He looked up. “I’ve no fault to find with the thing, Harry. It’s generous.”

“Then you had better sign it, and we’ll get Hastings to witness it in a minute or two. In the meanwhile there’s a thing I have to ask you. How do you stand in regard to Miss Ismay?”

Hawtrey pushed his chair back noisily. “That,” he said, “is a subject on which I’m naturally not disposed to give you any information. How does it concern you?”

“In this way. Believing that your engagement must be broken off, I asked Miss Ismay to marry me.”

Hawtrey was clearly startled, but in a moment or two he smiled.

“Of course,” he said, “she wouldn’t. As a matter of fact, our engagement isn’t broken off. It’s merely extended.”

The two men looked at each other in silence for a moment or two, and there was a curious hardness in Wyllard’s eyes. Hawtrey spoke again.

“In view of what you have just told me, why did you want to put me, of all people, in charge of the Range?” he asked.

“I’ll be candid,” answered Wyllard. “For one thing, you held on when I was slipping off the trestle that day in British Columbia. For another, you’ll make nothing of your own holding, and if you run the Range as it ought to be run it will put a good many dollars into your pocket, besides relieving me of a big anxiety. If you’re to marry Miss Ismay, I’d sooner she was made reasonably comfortable.”

Hawtrey looked up with a flush in his face.

“Harry,” he said, “this is extravagantly generous.”

“Wait,” returned Wyllard; “there’s a little more to be said. I can’t be back before the frost, and I may be away eighteen months. While I am away you will have a clear field—and you must make the most of it. If you are not married when I come back I shall ask Miss Ismay again. Now”—and he glanced at his comrade steadily—“does this stand in the way of you’re going on with the arrangement we have arrived at?”

There was a rather tense silence for a moment or two, and then Hawtrey said:

“No; after all there is no reason why it should do so. It has no practical bearing upon the other question.”

Wyllard rose. “Well,” he suggested, “if you will call Allen Hastings in we’ll get this thing fixed up.”

The document was duly signed, and a few minutes later Wyllard drove away.

Mrs. Hastings contrived to have a few words with Hawtrey before he left the house.

“I’ve no doubt that Harry took you into his confidence on a certain point,” she remarked.

“Yes,” admitted Hawtrey, “he did. I was a little astonished, besides feeling rather sorry for him. There is, however, reason to believe that he’ll soon get over it.”

“You feel sure of that?” Mrs. Hastings smiled.

“Isn’t it evident? If he had cared much about her he certainly wouldn’t have gone away.”

“You mean you wouldn’t?”

“No,” declared Hawtrey, “there’s no doubt of that.”

Mrs. Hastings smiled again. “Well,” she commented, “I would like to think you were right about Harry; it would be a relief to me.”

Hawtrey presently drove away, and soon after he left the homestead Agatha approached Mrs. Hastings.

“There’s something I must ask you,” she said. “Has Gregory consented to take charge of Wyllard’s farm?”

“He has,” answered Mrs. Hastings in her dryest tone.

There was a flash in Agatha’s eyes.

“Oh,” she said, “it’s almost unendurable.”

Agatha saw Wyllard only once again, and that was when he called early one morning. He got down from the wagon where Dampier sat, and shook hands with her and Allen and Mrs. Hastings. Few words were spoken, and she could not remember what she said, but when he swung himself up again and the wagon jolted away into the white prairie she went back to the house with a feeling of loss and depression.