“The room is very hot,” said Winston tentatively.

“Yes,” said the girl.  “I fancy it would be cooler in the hall.”

They passed out together into the shadowy hall, but a little gleam of light from the doorway behind them rested on Maud Barrington as she sat down.  She looked inquiringly at the man as though in wait for something.

“It is distinctly cooler here,” he said.

Maud Barrington laughed impatiently.  “It is,” she said.

“Well,” said Winston, with a little smile, “I will try again.  Wheat has made another advance lately.”

The girl turned towards him with a little sparkle in her eyes.  Winston saw it, and the faint shimmer of the pearls upon the whiteness of her neck, and then moved his head so that he looked out upon the dusky prairie.

“Pshaw!” she said.  “You know why you were brought here to-night.”

Winston admired her courage, but did not turn round, for there were times when he feared his will might fail him.  “I fancy I know why your aunt was so gracious to me.  Do you know that her confidence almost hurts me?”

“Then why don’t you vindicate it and yourself?  Dane would be your mouthpiece, and two or three words would be sufficient.”

Winston made no answer for a space.  Somebody was singing in the room behind them, and through the open window he could see the stars in the soft indigo above the great sweep of prairie.  He noticed them vacantly and took a curious impersonal interest in the two dim figures standing close together outside the window.  One was a young English lad, and the other a girl in a long white dress.  What they were doing there was no concern of his, but any trifle that diverted his attention a moment was welcome in that time of strain, for he had felt of late that exposure was close at hand, and was fiercely anxious to finish his work before it came.  Maud Barrington’s finances must be made secure before he left Silverdale, and he must remain at any cost until the wheat was sold.

Then he turned slowly towards her.  “It is not your aunt’s confidence that hurts me the most.”

The girl looked at him steadily, the color a trifle plainer in her face, which she would not turn from the light, and a growing wonder in her eyes.

“Lance,” she said, “we both know that it is not misplaced.  Still, your impassiveness does not please us.”

Winston groaned inwardly and the swollen veins showed on his forehead.  His companion had leaned forward a little so that she could see him, and one white shoulder almost touched his own.  The perfume of her hair was in his nostrils, and when he remembered how cold she had once been to him, a longing that was stronger than the humiliation that came with it grew almost overwhelming.  Still, because of her very trust in him, there was a wrong he could not do, and it dawned on him that a means of placing himself beyond further temptation was opening to him.  Maud Barrington, he knew, would have scanty sympathy with an intrigue of the kind Courthorne’s recent adventure pointed to.