Dark, and true, and tender is the North. Heaven bless the rhymster who first penned those words. Spring is stealing hack to the prairie, and our world is a world of beauty. The sky to-day is windrowed with flat-bottomed cumulus-clouds, tier beyond tier above a level plane of light, marking off the infinite distance like receding mile-stones on a world turned over on its back. Occasionally the outstretched head of a wild duck, pumping north with a black throb of wings, melts away to a speck in the opaline air. Back among the muskeg reeds the waders are courting and chattering, and early this morning I heard the plaintive winnowing call-note of the Wilson snipe, and later the punk-e-lunk love-cry of a bittern to his mate. There’s an eagle planing in lazy circles high in the air, even now, putting a soft-pedal on the noise of the coots and grebes as he circles over their rush-lined cabarets. And somewhere out on the range a bull is lowing. It is the season of love and the season of happiness. Dinkie and Poppsy and I are going 373 out to gather prairie-crocuses. They are thick now in the prairie-sod, soft blue and lavender and sometimes mauve. We must dance to the vernal saraband while we can: Spring is so short in this norland country of ours. It comes late. But as Peter says, A late spring never deceives....

I thought I had offended Peter for life. But when he appeared late this afternoon and I asked him why he had kept away from me, he said these first few days naturally belonged to Dinkie and he’d been busy studying marsh-birds. He looked rather rumpled and muddy, and impressed me as a man sadly in need of a woman to look after his things.

“Let’s ride,” said Peter. “I want to talk to you.”

I was afraid of that talk, but I was more afraid something might happen to interfere with it. So I changed into my old riding-duds and put on my weather-stained old sombrero and we saddled Buntie and Laughing-Gas and went loping off over the sun-washed prairie with our shadows behind us.

We rode a long way before Peter said anything. I wanted to be happy, but I wasn’t quite able to be. I tried to think of neither the past nor the future, but there were too many ghosts of other days loping along the trail beside us. 374

“What are you going to do?” Peter finally inquired.

“About what?” I temporized as he pulled up beside me.

“About everything,” he ungenerously responded.

“I don’t know what to do, Peter,” I had to acknowledge. “I’m like a barrel without hoops. I want to stick together, but one more thump will surely send me to pieces!”

“Then why not get the hoops around?” suggested Peter.

“But where will I get the hoops?” I asked.

“Here,” he said. He was, I noticed, holding out his arms. And I laughed, even though my heart was heavy.

“Men have been a great disappointment to me, Peter,” I said with a shake of my sombrero.

“Try me,” suggested Peter.

But still again I had to shake my head.

“That wouldn’t be fair, Peter,” I told him. “I can’t spoil your life to see what’s left of my own patched up.”

“Then you’re going to spoil two of ’em!” he promptly asserted.

“But I don’t believe in that sort of thing,” I did 375 my best to explain to him. “I’ve had my innings, and I’m out. I’ve a one-way heart, the same as a one-way street. I don’t think there’s anything in the world more odious than promiscuity. That’s a big word, but it stands for an even bigger offense against God. I’ve always said I intended to be a single-track woman.”

“But your track’s blown up,” contended Peter.

“Then I’ll have to lay me a new one,” I said with a fine show of assurance.

“And do you know where it will lead?” he demanded,

“Where?” I asked.

“Straight to me,” he said as he studied me with eyes that were so quiet and kind I could feel a flutter of my heart-wings.

But still again I shook my head.

“That would be bringing you nothing but a withered up old has-been,” I said with a mock-wail of misery.

And Peter actually laughed at that.

“It’ll be a good ten years before you’ve even grown up,” he retorted. “And another twenty years before you’ve really settled down!” 376

“You’re saying I’ll never have sense,” I objected. “And I know you’re right.”

“That’s what I love about you,” averred Peter.

“What you love about me?” I demanded.

“Yes,” he said with his patient old smile, “your imperishable youthfulness, your eternal never-ending eternity-defying golden-tinted girlishness!”

A flute began to play in my heart. And I knew that like Ulysses’s men I would have to close my ears to it. But it’s easier to row past an island than to run away from your own heart.

“I know it’s a lie, Peter, but I love you for saying it. It makes me want to hug you, and it makes me want to pirouette, if I wasn’t on horseback. It makes my heart sing. But it’s only the singing of one lonely little chickadee in the middle of a terribly big pile of ruins. For that’s all my life can be now, just a hopeless smash-up. And you’re cut out for something better than a wrecking-car for the rest of your days.”

“No, no,” protested Peter. “It’s you who’ve got to save me.”

“Save you?” I echoed.

“You’ve got to give me something to live for, or 377 I’ll just rust away in the ditch and never get back to the rails again.”

“Peter!” I cried.

“What?” he asked.

“You’re not playing fair. You’re trying to make me pity you.”

“Well, don’t you?” demanded Peter.

“I would if I saw you sacrificing your life for a woman with a crazy-quilt past.”

“I’m not thinking of the past,” asserted Peter, “I’m thinking of the future.”

“That’s just it,” I tried to explain. “I’ll have to face that future with a clouded name. I’ll be a divorced woman. Ugh! I always thought of divorced women as something you wouldn’t quite care to sit next to at table. I hate divorce.”

“I’m a Quaker myself,” acknowledged Peter. “But I occasionally think of what Cobbett once said: ‘I don’t much like weasels. Yet I hate rats. Therefore I say success to the weasels!’”

“I don’t see what weasels have to do with it,” I complained.

“Putting one’s house in order again may sometimes be as beneficent as surgery,” contended Peter.

“And sometimes as painful,” I added. 378

“Yet there’s no mistake like not cleaning up old mistakes.”

“But I hate it,” I told him. “It all seems so—so cheap.”

“On the contrary,” corrected Peter, “it’s rather costly.” He pulled up across my path and made me come to a stop. “My dear,” he said, very solemn again, “I know the stuff you’re made of. I know you’ve got to climb to the light by a path of your own choosing. And you have to see the light with your own eyes. But I’m willing to wait. I have waited, a very long time. But there’s one fact you’ve got to face: I love you too much ever to dream of giving you up.”

I don’t think either of us moved for a full moment. The flute was singing so loud in my heart that I was afraid of myself. And, woman-like, I backed away from the thing I wanted.

“It’s not me, Peter, I must remember now. It’s my bairns. I’ve two bairns to bring up.”

“I’ve got the three of you to bring up,” maintained Peter. And that made us both sit silent for another moment or two.

“It’s not that simple,” I finally said, though Peter smiled guardedly at my ghost of a smile. 379

“It would be if you cared for me as much as Dinkie does,” he said with quite unnecessary solemnity.

“Oh, Peter, I do, I do,” I cried out as the memory of all I owed him surged mistily through my mind. “But a gray hair is something you can’t joke away. And I’ve got five of them, right here over my left ear. I found them, months ago. And they’re there to stay!”

“How about my bald spot?” demanded my oppressor and my deliverer rolled into one.

“What’s a bald spot compared to a bob-cat of a temper like mine?” I challenged, remembering how I’d once heard a revolver-hammer snap in my husband’s face.

“But it’s your spirit I like,” maintained the unruffled Peter.

“You wouldn’t always,” I reminded him.

Yet he merely looked at me with his trust-me-and-test-me expression.

“I’ll chance it!” he said, after a quite contented moment or two of meditative silence.

“But don’t you see,” I went forlornly arguing on, “it mustn’t be a chance. That’s something people of our age can never afford to take.”

And Peter, at that, for some reason I couldn’t 380 fathom, began to wag his head. He did it slowly and lugubriously, like a man who inspects a road he has no liking for. But at the same time, apparently, he was finding it hard to tuck away a small smile of triumph.

“Then we must never see each other again,” he solemnly asserted.

“Peter!” I cried.

“I must go away, at once,” he meditatively observed.

“Peter!” I said again, with the flute turning into a pair of ice-tongs that clamped into the corners of my heart.

“Far, far away,” he continued as he studiously avoided my eye. “For there will be safety now only in flight.”

“Safety from what?” I demanded.

“From you,” retorted Peter.

“But what will happen to me, if you do that?” I heard my own voice asking as Buntie started to paw the prairie-floor and I did my level best to fight down the black waves of desolation that were half-drowning me. “What’ll there be to hold me up, when you’re the only man in all this world who can keep my barrel 381 of happiness from going slap-bang to pieces? What––?”

“Verboten!” interrupted Peter. But that solemn-soft smile of his gathered me in and covered me, very much as the rumpled feathers of a mother-bird cover her young, her crazily twittering and crazily wandering young who never know their own mind.

“What’ll happen to me,” I went desperately on, “when you’re the only man alive who understands this crazy old heart of mine, when you’ve taught me to hitch the last of my hope on the one unselfish man I’ve ever known?”

This seemed to trouble Peter. But only remotely, as the lack of grammar in the Lord’s Prayer might affect a Holy Roller. He insisted, above all things, on being judicial.

“Then I’ll have to come back, I suppose,” he finally admitted, “for Dinkie’s sake.”

“Why for Dinkie’s sake?” I asked.

“Because some day, my dear, our Dinkie is going to be a great man. And I want to have a hand in fashioning that greatness.”

I sat looking at the red ball of the sun slipping down behind the shoulder of the world. A wind came out of the North, cool and sweet and balsamic with 382 hope. I heard a loon cry. And then the earth was still again.

“We’ll be waiting,” I said, with a tear of happiness tickling the bridge of my nose. And then, so that Peter might not see still another loon crying, I swung Buntie sharply about on the trail. And we rode home, side by side, through the twilight.

THE END