hine
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 new-comers 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 those eyes. But Eric read no meaning in
these details. To him this beauty was something more than color and
line; it was as a flash of white light, in which one cannot
distinguish color because all colors are there. To him it