th eagerness.

She glanced up at him shyly.

"If you will ask me again when I come back, I will give you your
answer."

She left him no reason for doubting what that answer would be; and,
stretching out his arms, he drew her strongly to him. In a minute or
two, however, Sylvia insisted on his returning to his host, and soon
afterward Mrs. Kettering came in to look for her.

CHAPTER XX

A BLIZZARD

A bitter wind searched the poplar bluff where George and his hired man,
Grierson, were cutting fuel. Except in the river valleys, trees of any
size are scarce on the prairie, but the slender trunks and leafless
branches were closely massed and afforded a little shelter. Outside on
the open waste, the cold was almost too severe to face, and George once
or twice glanced anxiously across the snowy levels, looking for some
sign of Edgar, who should have joined them with the team and sledge.
It was, however, difficult to see far, because a gray dimness narrowed
in the horizon. George stood, dressed in snow-flecked furs, in the
center of a little clearing strewn with rows of fallen trunks from
which he was hewing off the branches. The work was hard; his whole
body strained with each stroke of the heavy ax, but it failed to keep
him warm, and the wind was growing more bitter with the approach of
night.

"I don't know what can be keeping West," he said after a while. "We
haven't seen the mail-carrier either, and he's two hours late; but he
must have had a heavy trail all the way from the settlement. I expect
he'll cut out our place and make straight for Grant's. We'll have snow
before long."

There was an empty shack not far away where, by George's consent, the
mail-carrier left letters when bad weather made it desirable to shorten
his round.

Grierson nodded as he glanced about. The stretch of desolate white
prairie had contracted since he had last noticed it, the surrounding
dimness was creeping nearer in, and the ranks of poplar trunks were
losing their sharpness of form. Now that the men had ceased chopping,
they could hear the eerie moaning of the wind and the sharp patter of
icy snow-dust among the withered brush.

"It will take him all his time to fetch Grant's; I wish Mr. West would
come before it gets dark," Grierson said with a shiver, and fell to
work again.

Several minutes passed. George was thinking more about the
mail-carrier's movements than about Edgar's. The English letters
should h