dark. He never
complained, but he was distressed at this sudden and unaccountable
desertion.

Seth's wound and broken shoulder had healed. He had been up a week, but
this was his first day out of the house. Now he stood staring out with
shaded eyes in the direction of the Reservations. During the past week he
had received visits from many of the neighboring settlers. Parker,
particularly, had been his frequent companion. He had learned all that it
was possible for him to learn by hearsay of the things which most
interested him; but, even so, he felt that he had much time to make up,
much to learn that could come only from his own observation.

Now, on this his first day out in the open, he found himself feeling very
weak, a thin, pale shadow of his former self. Curiously enough he had
little inclination for anything. He simply stood gazing upon the scene
before him, drinking in deep draughts of the pure, bracing, spring air.
Though his thoughts should have been with those matters which concerned
the welfare of the homestead, they were thousands of miles away, somewhere
in a London of his own imagination, among people he had never seen,
looking on at a life and pleasures of which he had no knowledge of, and
through it all he was struggling to understand how it was Rosebud had come
to forget them all so utterly, and so suddenly.

He tried to make allowances, to point out to himself the obligations of
the girl's new life. He excused her at every point; yet, when it was all
done, when he had proved to himself the utter impossibility of her keeping
up a weekly correspondence, he was dissatisfied, disappointed. There was
something behind it all, some reason which he could not fathom.

In the midst of these reflections he was joined by Rube. The old man was
smoking his after-breakfast pipe.

"She's openin'," he said, indicating the brown patches of earth already
showing through the snow. Seth nodded.

They were standing just outside the great stockade which had been
completed during Seth's long illness. There were only the gates waiting to
be hung upon their vast iron hinges.

After the old man's opening remark a long silence fell. Seth's thoughts
ran on unchecked in spite of the other's presence. Rube smoked and watched
the lean figure beside him out of the corners of his eyes. He was
speculating, too, but his thought was of their own immediate surroundings.
Now that Seth was about again he felt that it would be good