“You can scarcely fancy how pleasant this is,” he said.  “For eight years, in fact ever since I left England, no woman has ever done any of these graceful little offices for me.”

Miss Barrington glanced at her niece, and both of them knew that, if the lawyer had traced Courthorne’s past correctly, this could not be true.  Still, there was no disbelief in the elder lady’s eyes, and the girl’s faith remained unshaken.

“Eight years,” she said, with a little smile, “is a very long while.”

“Yes,” said Winston, “horribly long, and one year at Silverdale is worth them all—­that is, a year like this one, which is going to be remembered by all who have sown wheat on the prairie, and that leads up to something.  When I have plowed all my own holding, I shall not be content, and I want to make another bargain.  Give me the use of your unbroken land, and I will find horses, seed, and men, while we will share what it yields us when the harvest is in.”

The girl was astonished.  This, she knew, was splendid audacity, for the man had already staked very heavily on the crop he had sown, and while the daring of it stirred her she sat silent a moment.

“I could lose nothing, but you will have to bring out a host of men, and have risked so much,” she said.  “Nobody but you and me and three or four others in all the province is plowing more than half his holdings.”

The suggestion of comradeship set Winston’s blood tingling, but it was with a little laugh he turned over the pile of papers on the table, and then took them up in turn.

“’Very little plowing has been done in the tracts of Minnesota previously alluded to.  Farmers find wheat cannot be grown at present prices, and there is apparently no prospect of a rise,’” he read.  “’The Dakota wheat-growers are mostly fallowing.  They can’t quite figure how they would get eighty cents for the dollar’s worth of seeding this year.  Milling very quiet in Winnipeg.  No inquiries from Europe coming in, and Manitoba dealers, generally, find little demand for harrows or seeders this year.  Reports from Assiniboia seem to show that the one hope this season will be mixed farming and the neglect of cereals.’”

“There is only one inference,” he said.  “When the demand comes, there will be nothing to meet it with.”

“When it comes,” said Maud Barrington quietly.  “But you who believe it will stand alone.”

“Almost,” said Winston.  “Still, there are a few much cleverer men who feel as I do.  I can’t give you all my reasons, or read you the sheaf of papers from the Pacific slope, London, New York, Australia, but while men lose hope, and little by little the stocks run down, the world must be fed.  Just as sure as the harvest follows the sowing, it will wake up suddenly to the fact that it is hungry.  They are buying cotton and scattering their money in other nation’s bonds in the old country now, for they and the rest of Europe forget their necessities at times, but is it impossible to picture them finding their granaries empty and clamoring for bread?”