green garden spot that she
called home, a spot redolent of flowers, sweet with the odor of
new-mown grass, and pungent with whiff of pine and cedar, different as
night is from day.

Her heart sank within her as she looked.

It was late in the afternoon when she came to her station, a
collection of frame shanties dignified by that name, and Seth, tall,
tanned and radiant, clasped her in his arms, and man though he was,
shed tears of pure rapture.

His joy served to thrill her momentarily to the extent of forgetting
the wind, but with his departure for the vehicle which was to convey
her to their home, the discomfort of it returned to her.

The madness of it! The fury of it! Its fiendish joy! It tore at her
skirts. It wrapped them about her. It snatched them away again,
flapping them flaglike.

It was with difficulty that she kept her hat on her head. She held it
with both hands.

The wind seemed to make sport of her, to laugh at her. It treated her
as it would a tenderfoot. It tried to frighten her. It blew the
shutters of the shanties open and slammed them to with a noise like
guns. It shrieked maniacally as if rejoicing in her discomfort. At
times it seemed to hoot at her.

Added to this, when Seth returned for her with the vehicle, it proved
to be a common two-wheeled cart drawn by a mule, a tall, ungainly cart
of dull and faded blue.

She kept back the tears as Seth helped her in.

Then she sat silently by him throughout their jolting journey over the
prairie country into what seemed to her to be the Nowhere, listening
to the wind chant, now requiems, now dirges, listening to its shriek
and whistle, listening to it cry aloud and moan, die down to a
whisper, then rise once more and wail like a living thing in
unendurable pain.

Seth, too, by and by fell into silence, but from a different cause.
The wind failed to distress him. He had become accustomed to it in the
months spent in preparing her home. It was like an old friend that
sometimes whispered in his tired ears words of infinite sweetness. He
forgave the wanton shrieks of it because of this sweetness, the
sweetness of a capricious woman, all the more sweet because of her
capriciousness.

He was silent from pure happiness at having Celia there beside him,
going over the same road with him in the old blue cart.

From time to time he glanced at her timidly as if half afraid if he
looked too hard the wind might blow her away.

And, indeed, there