What I fail to see, is where your
reward for all this will come from, because I am still convinced that
the soil will, so to speak, give you back eighty cents for every dollar
you put into it. I would, however, like to look at those implements.
I have never seen better ones."

He dismounted and helped his companion down, for Winston made no
answer. The farmer was never sure what actuated him, but, save in an
occasional fit of irony, he had not attempted by any reference to make
his past fall into line with Courthorne's since he had first been
accepted as the latter at Silverdale. He had taken the dead man's
inheritance for a while, but he would stoop no further, and to speak
the truth, which he saw was not credited, brought him a grim amusement
and also flung a sop to his pride. Presently, however, Miss Barrington
turned to him, and there was a kindly gleam in her eyes as she glanced
at the splendid horses and widening strip of plowing.

"You have the hope of youth, Lance, to make this venture when all looks
black--and it pleases me," she said. "Sometimes I fancy that men had
braver hearts than they have now, when I was young."

Winston flushed a trifle, and stretching out an arm swept his hand
round the horizon. "All that looked dead a very little while ago, and
now you can see the creeping greenness in the sod," he said. "The lean
years cannot last forever, and, even if one is beaten again, there is a
consolation in knowing that one has made a struggle. Now, I am quite
aware that you are fancying a speech of this kind does not come well
from me."

Maud Barrington had seen his gesture, and something in the thought that
impelled it, as well as the almost statuesque pose of his thinly-clad
figure, appealed to her. Courthorne as farmer, with the damp of clean
effort on his forehead and the stain of the good soil that would
faithfully repay it on his garments, had very little in common with the
profligate and gambler. Vaguely she wondered whether he was not
working out his own redemption by every wheat furrow torn from the
virgin prairie, and then again the doubt crept in. Could this man have
ever found pleasure in the mire?

"You will plow your holding, Lance?" asked the elder lady, who had not
answered his last speech yet, but meant to later.

"Yes," said the man. "All I can. It's a big venture, and, if it
fails, will cripple me, but I seem to feel, apart from any reason I can
discern, that wheat is g