any difficulty."

Hastings still seemed embarrassed, and she was becoming puzzled by his
manner.

"Once upon a time you would have done anything possible to make things
easier for him," he said. "I wonder if I might ask if to some extent
you have that feeling still?"

"Of course. If he is in serious trouble I should be glad to do
anything within my power to help him."

"Even if it cost, we will say, about six hundred English pounds?"

Agatha gazed at him in bewildered astonishment. "There are some twenty
dollars in my possession which your wife handed me not long ago."

"Still, if you had the money, you would be glad to help him--and would
not regret it afterwards?"

"No," said Agatha decisively; "if I had the means, and the need was
urgent, I should be glad to do what I could." Then she laughed. "I
can't understand in the least how this is to the purpose."

"If you will wait for the next two or three months I may be able to
explain it to you," said Hastings. "In the meanwhile, there are one or
two things I have to do."

Agatha sat still when he left her, wondering what he could have meant,
but feeling that she would be willing to do what she had assured him.
His suggestion that it was possible that she still cherished any sense
of grievance against Gregory because he was going to marry Sally,
however, brought a little scornful smile into her eyes. It was
singularly easy to forgive Gregory that, for she now saw him as he
was--shallow, careless, shiftless, a man without depth of character.
He had a few surface graces, and on occasion a certain half-insolent
forcefulness of manner which in a curious fashion was almost becoming.
There was, however, nothing beneath the surface. When he had to face a
crisis he collapsed like a pricked bladder, which was the first simile
she could think of, though she admitted that it was not a particularly
elegant one. He was, it seemed, quite willing that a woman should help
him out of the trouble he had involved himself in, for she had no doubt
that Sally had sent Hastings on his somewhat incomprehensible errand.

Then a clear voice came in through the window, and turning towards it
she saw that a young lad clad in blue duck was singing as he drove his
binder through the grain. The song was a very simple one which had
some vogue just then upon the prairie, but her eyes grew suddenly hazy
as odd snatches of it reached her through the beat of hoofs, the clash
of the bi