pted the more than half-willing
recognition of her father, who wanted to get into communication with the
baby. He was offering for sale a young team and John, thinking to do a
magnanimous thing, bought Patsie. Elizabeth accepted the visit and the
horse without emotions of any sort, and left her husband annoyed and her
family floundering in perplexity at her passive attitude toward life. At
home that night he said to her sneeringly:

"No matter what a man does for you, you pout, and act as if you didn't
like it. If I don't offer to take you you're mad, and if I do you set
around and act as if you were bored to death by having to go. What th'
devil's a man to do?"

"I was perfectly willing to go," was the reply, and she went on dressing
Jack for bed without looking up.

John cast a baffled look at her as she carried the child out of the room,
and returned to his uncomfortable thoughts without trying to talk of
anything else when she returned and sat down to sew. The sitting room in
which they spent their evenings was in perfect order; the whole house was
never so orderly, nor their table better served, but John pined for
companionship. The work he had worn her out in doing was never better
performed, but there was no love in the doing, and when he addressed her,
though her answer was always ready and kind, there was no love in it, and
he was learning that our equity in the life of another has fixed and
unalterable lines of demarkation.

Thus matters progressed till February, when Jake was called home to Iowa
by the death of his mother. Jake had lived such a careless, happy-go-lucky
sort of life that he was obliged to borrow a large part of his railroad
fare from John Hunter, who was himself so badly in debt that he was
wondering how he was to meet the interest which would fall due in May.
John gave him the money with the understanding that Jake would come back
in time for the early seeding, and prepared to take him into town. Jake
was the only man left on the farm, and there was consternation in John's
heart at the prospect of having all the chores thrown upon his own
shoulders in cold weather. Jake had been the only reliable man he had ever
been able to hire. The more independent sort of hired men resented John
Hunter's interference in the farm work, which they understood far better
than he, and seldom stayed long, but Jake Ransom liked Elizabeth, was
close friends with Luther Hansen, and since he saw the mistress of