“My dear, I sometimes fancy I am a hypercritical old fogy!” he said, and sighed a little, while once more the anxious look crept into his face.  “Just now I wish devoutly I was a better business man.”

Nothing more was said for a little, and Miss Barrington watched the crimson sunset burn out low down on the prairie’s western rim.  Then the pale stars blinked out through the creeping dusk, and a great silence and an utter cold settled down upon the waste.  The muffled thud of hoofs, and the crunching beneath the sliding steel seemed to intensify it, and there was a suggestion of frozen brilliancy in the sparkle flung back by the snow.  Then a coyote howled dolefully on a distant bluff, and the girl shivered as she shrank down further amidst the furs.

“Forty degrees of frost,” said the Colonel.  “Perhaps more.  This is very different from the cold of Montreal.  Still, you’ll see the lights of Silverdale from the crest of the next rise.”

It was, however, an hour before they reached them, and Miss Barrington was almost frozen when the first square loghouse rose out of the prairie.  It and others that followed it flitted by, and then, flanked by a great birch bluff, with outlying barns, granaries, and stables, looming black about it against a crystalline sky, Silverdale Grange grew into shape across their way.  Its rows of ruddy windows cast streaks of flickering orange down the trail, the baying of dogs changed into a joyous clamor, when the Colonel reined in his team, half-seen men in furs waved a greeting, and one who risked frostbite with his cap at his knee handed Miss Barrington from the sleigh and up the veranda stairway.

She had need of the assistance, for her limbs were stiff and almost powerless, and she gasped a little when she passed into the drowsy warmth and brightness of the great log-walled hall.  The chilled blood surged back tingling to her skin, and swaying with a creeping faintness she found refuge in the arms of a gray-haired lady who stooped and kissed her gently.  Then the door swung to, and she was home again in the wooden grange of Silverdale, which stood far remote from any civilization but its own on the frozen levels of the great white plain.

CHAPTER VI

ANTICIPATIONS

It was late at night, and outside the prairie lay white and utterly silent under the arctic cold, when Maud Barrington, who glanced at it through the double windows, flung back the curtains with a little shiver, and turning towards the fire sat down on a little velvet footstool beside her aunt’s knee.  She had shaken out the coils of lustrous brown hair which flowed about her shoulders glinting in the light of the shaded lamp, and it was with a little gesture of physical content she stretched her hands towards the hearth.  A crumbling birch log still gleamed redly amidst the feathery ashes, but its effect was chiefly artistic, for no open fire could have dissipated the cold of the prairie, and a big tiled stove, brought from Teutonic Minnesota, furnished the needful warmth.