d pointed towards the south. "From Florida, Cuba, Yucatan; further
than that, perhaps. In a day or two they'll push on again toward the
Pole, and others will take their places. There's a further detachment
arriving now."

Looking up, Agatha saw a straggling wedge of birds dotted in dusky
specks against the vault of transcendental blue. The wedge coalesced,
drew out again, and dropped swiftly, and the air was filled with the
rush of wings; then there was a harsh crying and splashing, and she
heard the troubled water lap among the reeds until deep silence closed
in upon the slough again.

"The migrating instinct is strangely interesting," she said.

A curious look crept into Wyllard's eyes.

"It gives the poor birds a sad destiny, I think; they're wanderers and
strangers without a habitation; there's unrest in them. After a few
months on the tundra mosses to gather strength and teach the young to
fly, they'll unfold their wings to beat another passage before the icy
gales. Some of us, I think, are like them!"

Agatha could not avoid the personal application.

"You surely don't apply that to yourself," she said. "You certainly have
a habitation--the finest, isn't it, on this part of the prairie?"

"Yes," answered Wyllard slowly; "I suppose it is. I've now had a little
rest and quietness too."

His last remark did not appear to call for an answer, and Agatha sat
silent.

"Still," he went on reflectively, "I have a feeling that some day the
call will come, and I shall have to take the trail again." He paused,
and looked at her before he added, "It would be easier if one hadn't to
go alone, or, since that would be necessary, if one had at least
something to come back to when the journey was done."

"Must you heed the call?" asked Agatha, who was puzzled by his steady
gaze.

"Yes," he said with gravity, "the call will come from the icy North if
it ever comes at all."

There was another brief silence. Agatha wondered what he was thinking
of, but he soon told her.

"I remember how I came back from there last time," he said. "We were
rather late that season, and out of our usual beat when the gale broke
upon us in the gateway of the Pole, between Alaska and Asia. We ran
before it with a strip of the boom-foresail on one vessel and a jib that
blew to ribands every now and then. The schooner was small, ninety tons
or so, and for a week she scudded with the gray seas tumbling after her,
white-topped, out of the snow