ced all this,
and spoke to Talbot about it in distress. Talbot merely said, "Perhaps
it's her health; you'd better ask her." Stephen did so, and found there
was a reason for her apparent illness, which delighted and consoled him;
but when Katrine flew into a passion, declared it was detestable, that
it would take away her freedom and her power to ride and enjoy herself,
Stephen was shocked and grieved, and said he was disappointed in her;
whereupon Katrine replied she hated him, and Stephen quoted scripture
texts to her till she ran out of the cabin and rushed across to Talbot's
in a passion of sobs and tears. At least, she knew he would not quote
texts to her. Talbot did all he could to smooth out matters between the
two, and after that Katrine spoke very little; she took refuge in a
dejected silence, and grew paler each day. It was only when the men had
gone out to work, and she was left alone with a great pile of things to
mend, work which she hated, that she would go to the door and stand
looking out over the grey waste under the snow-filled lowering sky, with
the tears rolling silently down her checks. From where she stood she
could see, through the greyish air, the men working far down at the
other end of the claims, and the long line of trenches and the banks of
frozen gravel; sometimes, in the light fog, made of the tiny sharp
snow-flakes, sifting through the air, they would look misty, like ghosts
or shadows; and sometimes the dulled click and scrape of the spades
would reach her.

"Slaves, slaves, just like slaves," she would think, watching the
muffled-up figures continually bending over their work; "and they're
digging graves, graves." And she would think of Annie, and the grave
Will had been digging for her while he dug for gold. A red sun, dull as
copper, hung above them, and sometimes the great Northern Lights would
send up a red flame behind the horizon; and to Katrine it seemed like a
blood-covered sword held up by Nature to warn them off a land not fit
for men. One afternoon, when the sun looked more sullen and the sky more
threatening than ever, and the men moving at the end of the claim
looked no more than mere blots in the cold mist, she stood watching the
steady red blade shoot up in the ashen sky, and began comparing its
colour to other things. "It's as red," she said to herself softly, "as
Hearts and Diamonds;" and then her thought wandered to the cards
themselves, and she thought of the hot salo