l learn, and I
don't suppose it will matter a great deal if you don't do it quickly.
Somehow or other one worries through."

She felt that this was insufficient, though she remembered that his
haphazard carelessness had once appealed to her. Now she realized that
to undertake a thing light-heartedly was a very different matter from
carrying it out successfully. Then it once more occurred to her that she
was becoming absurdly hypercritical, and she strove to talk of other
things.

She did not find it easy, nor, though he made the effort, did Hawtrey.
There was a restraint upon him, for when he first saw her he had been
struck by the change in the girl. She was graver than he remembered her,
and, it seemed, very much more reserved. He had tried and failed, as he
thought of it, to strike any response in her. He became uneasily
conscious that he could not talk to her as he could to Sally Creighton.
There was something wanting in him or her, but he could not at the
moment tell what it was. Still, he assured himself, things would be
different next day, for the girl was evidently very tired.

The creeping dusk settled down upon the wilderness. The horizon
narrowed, and the stretch of grass before them grew dim. The trail they
now drove into grew rapidly rougher, and it was quite dark when they
came to the brink of a declivity still at least a league from the
Hastings homestead. It was one of the steep ravines that seam the
prairie. A birch bluff rose on either side, and a little creek flowed
through the hollow.

Hawtrey swung the whip when they reached the top, and the team plunged
furiously down the slope. He straightened himself in his seat with both
hands on the reins, and Agatha held her breath when she felt the light
vehicle tilt as the wheels on one side sank deep in a rut. Something
seemed to crack, and she saw the off horse stumble and plunge. The other
horse flung its head up, Hawtrey shouted something, and there was a
great smashing and snapping of undergrowth and fallen branches as they
drove in among the birches. The team stopped, and Hawtrey, who sprang
down, floundered noisily among the undergrowth, while another thud of
hoofs and rattle of wheels grew louder behind them up the trail. In a
minute or two Hawtrey came back and lifted Agatha down.

"It's the trace broken. I had to make the holes with my knife, and the
string's torn through," he explained. "Voltigeur got it round his feet,
and, as usual, tried