and there, bare
poles, or branches of trees, or slips of underbrush marked a road made
across the plains through the snow. The sun was going down golden red,
folding up the sky a wide soft curtain of pink and mauve and deep purple
merging into the fathomless blue, where already the stars were beginning
to quiver. The house stood on the edge of a little forest, which had
boldly asserted itself in the wide flatness. At this point in the west
the prairie merged into an undulating territory, where hill and wood
rolled away from the banks of the Saskatchewan, making another England
in beauty. The forest was a sort of advance-post of that land of beauty.

Yet there was beauty too on this prairie, though there was nothing to
the east but snow and the forest so far as eye could see. Nobility and
peace and power brooded over the white world.

As the girl looked, it seemed as though the bosom of the land rose and
fell. She had felt this vibrating life beat beneath the frozen surface.
Now, as she gazed, she smiled sadly to herself, with drooping eyelids
looking out from beneath strong brows.

"I know you--I know you," she said aloud. "You've got to take your toll.
And when you're lying asleep like that, or pretending to, you reach
up-and kill. And yet you can be kind-ah, but you can be kind and
beautiful! But you must have your toll one way or t'other." She sighed
and paused; then, after a moment, looking along the trail--"I don't
expect they'll come to-night, and mebbe not to-morrow, if--if they stay
for THAT."

Her eyes closed, she shivered a little. Her lips drew tight, and her
face seemed suddenly to get thinner. "But dad wouldn't--no, he couldn't,
not considerin'--" Again she shut her eyes in pain.

Her face was now turned from the western road by which she had expected
her travellers, and towards the east, where already the snow was taking
on a faint bluish tint, a reflection of the sky deepening nightwards
in that half-circle of the horizon. Distant and a little bleak and
cheerless the half-circle was looking now.

"No one--not for two weeks," she said, in comment on the eastern trail,
which was so little frequented in winter, and this year had been less
travelled than ever. "It would be nice to have a neighbour," she added,
as she faced the west and the sinking sun again. "I get so lonely--just
minutes I get lonely. But it's them minutes that seem to count more than
all the rest when they come. I expect that's it--we