She fancied that his step was slower than it had been, and that he seemed a trifle preoccupied and embarrassed, but he spoke with quiet kindliness when he handed her into the waiting sleigh, and the girl's spirits rose as they swung smoothly northwards behind two fast horses across the prairie.

It stretched away before her, ridged here and there with a dusky birch bluff or willow grove under a vault of crystalline blue.

The sun that had no heat in it struck a silvery glitter from the snow, and the trail swept back to the horizon a sinuous blue-gray smear, while the keen, dry cold and sense of swift motion set the girl's blood stirring.

After all, it seemed to her, there were worse lives than those the Western farmers led on the great levels under the frost and sun.
Colonel Barrington watched her with a little gleam of approval in his eyes.

"You are not sorry to come back to this and Silverdale ?" he said, sweeping his mittened hand vaguely round the horizon.
"No," said the girl, with a little laugh.