He made an emphatic gesture. "Still, we have to face the position as it is, and my part's plain. Everything you have been used to you shall have, so far as I can get it for you. You can have any of your friends here who will make the journey and be civil to your farmer-husband, and you can go to them when it pleases you. To save you ever asking me for money, I will open you an account in a Winnipeg bank, and you need never see me unless you wish to." "Ah," said Carrie, "you are, at least, generous. To make the understanding complete, what do you expect from me?" Leland moved and laid his hand upon her shoulder again. "Only to remember that, however little you think of your husband, you are my wife, after all." The girl's cheeks burned, but she looked up at him with a little hard laugh. "I think I could have struck you for that, but it must go with the rest. Still, even if I were all that your imagination could picture me, and went as far as Mrs. Heaton did, why should it trouble you?" Leland stooped lower over her with the veins swollen on his forehead and a glint in his eyes. "You and your father tricked me--taking all I had to offer for nothing," he said. "I suppose I ought to hate you, too--and still I can't." Once more he gripped her cruelly. "By the Lord, dolt that I am, I think I almost love you for the grit that made you show your scorn. Still, that doesn't count. It is for me to go it alone." He let his grasp relax and left her suddenly, turning at the door. "You will want a companion. Will you write for Mrs. Annersly to-morrow?" "I will," said Carrie coldly. "Under the circumstances it is advisable. She will be a protection." He went out and she saw no more of him for a day or two, but that night she found a blue mark upon the whiteness of her shoulder. CHAPTER VIII LELAND SEEKS DISTRACTION Dusk was creeping up from the eastwards across the great snow-sheeted plain when Leland pulled his horses up where a little by-track branched off from the beaten trail. Behind him the wilderness, losing its gleaming whiteness and fading into shades of soft blue-grey, ran level to the hard blueness on the northern horizon. In front of him there were rolling rises ridged with sinuous bands of birches, black in broken masses against the lingering light in the south and west. There was room for wheat enough to glut markets of the world on the leagues of rich black loam that undulated to the frozen waters of Lake Winnipeg. Already miles of it were banded together by belts of two-foot stubble; but as yet the plough had not invaded the land of bluff and ravine, creek and coulee, where the shaggy broncho and the wild steer ran.