developed in Eric until that night at
the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his violin across his
knee. After that, the gloom of his people settled down upon him, and the
gospel of maceration began its work.

_"If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,"_ et cetera. The pagan smile
that once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was one with sorrow.
Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it embitters, but when it
destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and where the agony of the cross
has been, joy will not come again. This man understood things literally:
one must live without pleasure to die without fear; to save the soul, it
was necessary to starve the soul.

The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her cavalier
left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch of road that runs
for some three miles through the French settlement, where the prairie
is as level as the surface of a lake. There the fields of flax and
wheat and rye are bordered by precise rows of slender, tapering Lombard
poplars. It was a yellow world that Margaret Elliot saw under the wide
light of the setting sun.

The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, "It will be safe
to run the horses here, won't it?"

"Yes, I think so, now," he answered, touching his spur to his pony's
flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old saying in the West that
newcomers always ride a horse or two to death before they get broken
in to the country. They are tempted by the great open spaces and try to
outride the horizon, to get to the end of something. Margaret galloped
over the level road, and Eric, from behind, saw her long veil fluttering
in the wind. It had fluttered just so in his dreams last night and the
night before. With a sudden inspiration of courage he overtook her and
rode beside her, looking intently at her half-averted face. Before, he
had only stolen occasional glances at it, seen it in blinding flashes,
always with more or less embarrassment, but now he determined to let
every line of it sink into his memory. Men of the world would have said
that it was an unusual face, nervous, finely cut, with clear, elegant
lines that betokened ancestry. Men of letters would have called it a
historic face, and would have conjectured at what old passions, long
asleep, what old sorrows forgotten time out of mind, doing battle
together in ages gone, had curved those delicate nostrils, left their
unconscious memory in t