The Lady Angella Luring arose at five in the morning, put on overalls, sheepskin coat, woolen gauntlets, and heavy overshoes. She tramped through the steadily falling snow to her barn, which housed a cow, a sow, a mare heavy in foal, a saddle horse and the poultry.

The March winds that had raged all the previous night had turned with the morning to a snowstorm, and the flakes were now falling so heavily that the barn was only just visible from the house as the woman rancher plodded through the blinding flakes.

First she threw into the pig-pen the pails of swill and mush she had brought from the house, then watered the stock, no easy matter, for the pumped water froze quickly in the trough, and she was forced to refill it several times. That done, she climbed into the hayloft, and with her pitchfork thrust down through the openings the morning feed for the cow, carefully measured chop from the bin for the mare, allowing half a pail of oats and a bunch of hay for the saddle horse; she threw to the chickens, hens that had followed hungrily in her wake, a pan full of ground barley and wheat seasoned with cayenne pepper, epsom salts and bits of bones and eggshells.

Finally she went to her milking. The cow was fresh, and she had a full pail. Half of this, however, she fed to the restless little calf, nosing near its mother, and trying to shake off the muzzle that Angella had snapped on the night before in order to wean it. The task of feeding the calf required patience and time, for the restive little "dogie" nearly knocked over the pail, and had to be taught how to drink by feeling the woman's fingers thrust, wet with the milk, into its mouth. She was more than an hour about her chores. With the half-filled pail in one hand, she tramped back to the house through the snow, falling now more heavily than before.

Before leaving the house Angella had lit her fire, and now the place was warm and snug, and the singing kettle lent it an air of cheer. There was a certain attractiveness about the poor shack on the prairie, in spite of its rough, bare log walls and two wee windows. Though she chose to wear men's clothing, and had cut her hair like a man's, yet one had only to look about that room to perceive that the eternal feminine had persisted notwithstanding her angry and pitiful attempt to quench it.

She had made most of the furniture herself, crude pieces fashioned from willow fence posts and grocery boxes, yet they betrayed a craftsman's talent, for the chairs, though designed for use, were rustic and pretty, and she had touched them in spots with bright red paint. The table, over which a vivid red oilcloth was nailed, made a bright patch of color in the room. Red, in most places, for decorative purposes, can be used only sparingly, but in a bleak log shack a splash of this ruddy color gives both warmth and cheer. The floor had been scrubbed until it was almost white, and a big red-brown cowhide made a carpet near the couch, which was covered with a calfskin. Indian ornaments and beadwork, bits of crockery and pewter were on the shelves that lined one side of the shack, and where also she kept her immaculately shining kettles, cooking utensils and dishes. A curtain of burlap sacks, edged with scarlet cloth, hung before the bedroom doorway. The pillows on the spotless bed were covered with cases made of flour bags. A large grocers' box, into which shelves had been nailed, was also covered with similar cloth and served as a sort of dressing table. Two chairs, made from smaller boxes, were padded with burlap, and a triangular shelf with a curtain before it made a closet in the corner of the room.

A huge gray cat followed the woman recluse about the room, sleepily rubbing itself against her, and purring with contentment when she picked it up in her arms.

Angella made her breakfast of oatmeal and tea, serving from the stove directly onto her plate. Her cat nestled in her lap while she breakfasted, and she smoothed it absently as she ate.

Time had smoothed out the lines on her face instead of adding to them, and the strained look of suffering in her eyes had given way to a healthy gaze. Her skin had almost the fresh color of a girl's. Her hair had grown abundantly, though it still was short and almost gray, but its natural curliness lent her face a soft and youthful air. There was no sign of the dread disease which had once threatened her life. She looked normal and wholesome as she sat at her table, her cat in her lap, deep in a brown study. It would be hard to say what filled Angella's thoughts when she was thus shut in alone in her shack upon the prairie. She had ceased long since to conjure up bitter visions of the man who was responsible for her father's death and her own exile. Her thoughts, at least, were no longer unbearably painful as in those early days when first she had come to Alberta, and many a day and night, shut in alone with her dismal secret, she had wrestled in bitter anguish with the crowding thoughts that came like ghosts to haunt her.

However, even in winter she had little enough time for thinking. Her life was crowded with work. When she had finished her meal, she washed her dishes, made her bed, kneaded the dough for her weekly baking, set a pot of beans, soaked overnight, into the oven, and prepared to go out again, this time to the pasture, where her few head of stock "rustled" for their feed all winter. A snowstorm at this time of year is always dangerous for the breeding stock dropping their calves with the approach of the spring. There were water holes, too, in the frozen slough that had to be broken in every day so that the cattle might have the water they needed. Angella, ax in hand, opened the door of her shack. A gale of wind and snow almost blinded her, so that at first she did not see the Ford that was plowing its way noisily and pluckily down the road allowance that led to her house. At the honk of the doctor's horn, which he worked steadily to attract her, she peered out through the storm, and she turned to the gate, where the car had now stopped.

She never encouraged the visits of Dr. McDermott, who had saved her life when first she had come to Alberta; but neither was she ever uncivil when he did come. Time had accustomed her to his regular calls, and, in truth, though she would not have admitted it for anything in the world, she had come to look forward to these visits, and to depend upon them for her news of the world, which she so bitterly told herself she had cast off forever.

Now, as his ruddy face was thrust through the curtains, Angella, frowning slightly, tramped to the car.

"Are you strong enough to lend me a hand lifting something?" asked the doctor.

"Certainly I'm strong enough. What do you mean?"

Dr. McDermott, out of the car now, unbuttoned the back curtains, and revealed to the amazed Angella the still heavily sleeping Nettie.

"There's a sick lass here," he said solemnly, "and a lass in sore trouble, I'm thinking."

A strange expression had come into the face of Angella Loring. Not so long since, it seemed to her, she had seen as in a dream this girl now lying on the floor of the doctor's car leaning over her, and had regarded her with the tender, compassionate gaze of her own mother. In the days of semi-consciousness that had followed her first seizure, the Englishwoman could endure the sight and touch of no one but the girl with the Madonna face. Without realizing what was amiss, all she knew was that Nettie was now as helpless as she had been when the girl had cared for her, and without a word or a question she helped the doctor lift Nettie out of the car and to carry her into the house.

Angella Loring believed that there was nothing about her of which this Scotch doctor approved. He came, she thought, merely to exercise his abnormal habit of interference in other folks' affairs and to find fault with her chosen manner of life. She had at first, in her desire to be alone, not hesitated to tell him she preferred her own company to any other. He had barked back that her taste was unnatural, and it would take more than "a bitter-tongued lass" to drive him from his duty. Questioned sarcastically as to what he conceived his duty to be, he had replied solemnly, "To keep an eye on you, lass, and to see that you come to no harm."

Furious as this gratuitous resolve to care for her had made the woman who believed she could fend for herself in the world, his answer had nevertheless brought the bitter tears to her angry eyes, so that she could not find words for a retort. The doctor's intention to protect the woman by no means made him lenient in his judgment of her; he denounced her cut hair as outrageous; her men's clothes as disgraceful, and her work in the field as against nature. She secretly enjoyed his explosion of rage when she took service at Bar Q.

No lass, declared the doctor, in her sober senses would disfigure herself by cutting off her head the hair that her Maker had planted there. No true woman would wear a mon's clothes. Mere contact with a wild brute like Bull Langdon would muddy any pure woman in the land. Her obsession—which is what he termed her aversion to his own sex—and her unnatural life alone was a pathological matter, for which she needed to be treated as for the unfortunate illness she had contracted in London. Some day, he warned her, she would thank him for the one cure as well as for the other.

She let him talk on, usually disdaining to answer, and she pursued her way undeterred by his wholesale condemnation of her and her course of life.

Yet Angella Loring, holding a little baby in her arms for the first time in her life, and looking down with dewy eyes upon the small blonde head resting so helplessly against her breast, could she have seen the face of the country doctor as he looked at the cropped bent head, would have known that all his thoughts of her were not wholly hard.

Glaring up at him to hide the impending tears, she almost surprised that look of grave tenderness on the rough face of the man who had known her as a child.

"She doesn't want it," said Angella Loring. "Her own child! Well, then, I'll keep it! It shan't want. I'll care for it."

"It's a wee laddie—born before its time, and nane too strong." He had a habit when unduly moved of lapsing into Gaelic, and what he muttered was unintelligible to the woman, wholly taken up with the baby in her arms. Could she have understood him she would have heard the doctor say that a woman who could mother another woman's "bairn" would be a good mother to her own.

Outside the snow was still heavily falling. Great mounds were piling up on all sides. That world of snow might have appalled the stranger, but to the farmer it meant certain moisture in the soil. A spring snowstorm was even more desirable for the land than rain, as it melted gradually into the earth. Already the sun was gleaming through the falling snowflakes, and the intense cold had abated.

"Weel, weel, I'll be off for a while, lass. There's much still to attend to."

"You can't go out in that storm," said Angella roughly. "Wait, I'll get you something to eat. Not even your Ford could plow through snow like that."

"Maybe not, and I'll not be taking the Ford."

"Well, I've no vehicle to lend you."

"I'll go afoot," said the doctor, wrapping his woolen scarf about his neck, preparatory to going out.

"You're a fool to go out," said Angella crossly. "Wait till you have a cup of coffee anyway."

"I'll be going just across the land, to the lad's cabin. I heard last night that he was back."

"Who's cabin? What land?"

"Young Cyril Stanley's—the scallawag. I'll have thot to say to him, I'm thinking, will bring him across in a hurry."

"He needn't come here!" Angella had started up savagely. "I don't want any man here, least of all a dog like that who'd do such a thing to a girl. He can keep away from my house. He's not fit to—to even look at her now. No man is."

"Weel, weel, 'tis true, but we're all liable to mistakes, ma'am, and young blood is hot and careless, and who are we—you and I—to judge another? We must look to our own consciences first, ma'am."

"Yes, stand up for him—defend him. You men all hang together. I know you all, and I hate you. I——"

She broke off, for the doctor was looking at her with such a strange look of mingled earnestness and tenderness, that the stormy words died on her lips, and she dropped her wet face upon the soft little one in her arms.

Dr. McDermott closed the door softly.