Maud Barrington smiled again.  “I did not laugh, and this is not England, though what you consider prejudices do not count for so much as they used to there, while there is, one is told quite frequently, no limit to what a man may attain to here, if he dares sufficiently.”

A little quiver ran through Winston, and he rose and stood looking down on her, with one brown hand clenched on the table and the veins showing on his forehead.

“You would have me stay?” he said.

Maud Barrington met his eyes, for the spirit that was in her was the equal of his.  “I would have you be yourself—­what you were when you came here in defiance of Colonel Barrington, and again when you sowed the last acre of Courthorne’s land, while my friends, who are yours too, looked on wondering.  Then you would stay—­if it pleased you.  Where has your splendid audacity gone?”

Winston slowly straightened himself, and the girl noticed the damp the struggle had brought there on his forehead, for he understood that if he would stretch out his hand and take it what he longed for might be his.

“I do not know, any more than I know where it came from, for until I met Courthorne I had never made a big venture in my life,” he said.  “It seems it has served its turn and left me—­for now there are things I am afraid to do.”

“So you will go away and forget us?”

Winston stood very still a moment, and the girl, who felt her heart beating, noticed that his face was drawn.  Still, she could go no further.  Then he said very slowly, “I should be under the shadow always if I stay, and my friends would feel it even more deeply than I would do.  I may win the right to come back again if I go away.”

Maud Barrington made no answer, but both knew no further word could be spoken on that subject until, if fate ever willed it, the man returned again, and it was a relief when Miss Barrington came in with Dane.  He glanced at his comrade keenly, and then seeing the grimness in his face, quietly declined the white-haired lady’s offer of hospitality.  Five minutes later the farewells were said, and Maud Barrington stood with the stinging flakes whirling about her in the doorway, while the sleigh slid out into the filmy whiteness that drove across the prairie.  When it vanished, she turned back into the warmth and brightness with a little shiver and one hand tightly closed.

The great room seemed very lonely when, while the wind moaned outside, she and her aunt sat down to dinner.  Neither of them appeared communicative, and both felt it a relief when the meal was over.  Then Maud Barrington smiled curiously as she rose and stood with hands stretched out towards the stove.

“Aunt,” she said.  “Twoinette has twice asked me to go back to Montreal, and I think I will.  The prairie is very dreary in the winter.”

It was about this time when, as the whitened horses floundered through the lee of a bluff where there was shelter from the wind, the men in the sleigh found opportunity for speech.