arlessly and still know when he had risked enough, soon after it was
thrashed out the wheat was sold. The harvesters went home with enough
to maintain them through the winter, and Winston, who spent two days
counting his gain, wrote asking Graham to send him an accountant from
Winnipeg. With him he spent a couple more days, and then, with an
effort he was never to forget, prepared himself for the reckoning. It
was time to fling off the mask before the eyes of all who had trusted
him.

He had thought it over carefully, and his first decision had been to
make the revelation to Colonel Barrington alone. That, however, would,
he felt, be too simple, and his pride rebelled against anything that
would stamp him as one who dare not face the men he had deceived. One
by one they had tacitly offered him their friendship and then their
esteem, until he knew that he was virtually leader at Silverdale, and
it seemed fitting that he should admit the wrong he had done them, and
bear the obloquy, before them all. For a while the thought of Maud
Barrington restrained him, and then he brushed that aside. He had
fancied with masculine blindness that what he felt for her had been
well concealed, and that her attitude to him could be no more than
kindly sympathy with one who was endeavoring to atone for a
discreditable past. Her anger and astonishment would be hard to bear,
but once more his pride prompted him, and he decided that she should at
least see he had the courage to face the results of his wrong-doing.
As it happened, he was given an opportunity, when he was invited to the
harvest celebration that was held each year at Silverdale.

It was a still, cool evening when every man of the community, and most
of the women, gathered in the big dining-room of the Grange. The
windows were shut now, for the chill of the early frost was on the
prairie, and the great lamps burned steadily above the long tables.
Cut glass, dainty china and silver gleamed beneath them amidst the ears
of wheat that stood in clusters for sole and appropriate ornamentation.
They merited the place of honor, for wheat had brought prosperity to
every man at Silverdale who had had the faith to sow that year.

On either hand were rows of smiling faces, the men's burned and
bronzed, the women's kissed into faintly warmer color by the sun, and
white shoulders shone amidst the somberly covered ones, while here and
there a diamond gleamed on a snowy neck. Barring