woman opened the door, her face and figure the very expression of dulled toil, hard work, bodily despair.  Alone on that prairie, one would have thought she would have welcomed a human countenance; but she looked on us as if she wished we would be gone, and hardly answered to our question of the road.  She was the type of the abandonment of human life.  I did not speak to her; but I see her now, as I saw her then, with a kind of surprise that a woman could come to be, by human life, like that.  There was no one else in the house; and she shut the door upon us after one sullen look and one scant sentence, as if we, and any other, were naught, and went back to her silence in that green waste, now gilded by the level sun, miles on miles.  I have often thought of her since, and what life was to her there, and found some image of other solitudes—­and men and women in them—­as expansive, as alienating as the wild prairie, where life hides itself, grows dehumanized, and dies.

We drove on, with some word of this; and, eating what we had with us in case of famine, made our supper from biscuit and flask; and, before darkness fell, we struck the creek road, and turned southward,—­a splendour of late sunset gleaming over the untravelled western bank, and dying out in red bloom and the purple of slow star-dawning overhead; and on we drove, with a hard road under us, having far to go.  At the first farmhouse we watered the willing ponies, who had long succumbed to our control, and who went as if they could not tire, steadily and evenly, under the same strong hand and kindly voice they had felt day-long.  It was then I took the reins for an easy stretch, giving my friend a change, and felt what so unobservably he had been doing all day with wrist and eye, while he listened.  So we drove down, and knew the moon was up by the changed heavens, though yet unseen behind the bluffs of the creek upon our left; and far away southward, in the evening light, lay the long valley like a larger river.  We still felt the upland, however, as a loftier air; and always as, when night comes, nature exercises some mysterious magic of the dark hour in strange places, there, as all day long, we seemed to draw closer to earth—­not earth as it is in landscape, a thing of beauty and colour and human kinship, but earth, the soil, the element, the globe.

This was in both our minds, and I had thought of it before he spoke after a long pause over the briar pipes that had comraded our talk since morning.  “I can’t talk of it now,” he said; “it’s gone into me in an hour that you have been years in thinking; but that is what you are to us.”  I say the things he said, for I cannot otherwise give his way, and that trust of love in which these thoughts were born on my lips; all those years, in many a distant place, I had thought for him almost as much as for myself.  “You knighted us,” he said, “and we fight your cause,”—­not knowing that kingship, however great or humble, is but the lowly knights