She hoped Ariadne could ride well, for she could.
But how white the world looked this morning, and how proud and brilliant
the sky! Nothing in the plane of vision but waves of snow stretching to
the Cypress Hills; far to the left a solitary house, with its tin roof
flashing back the sun, and to the right the Big Divide. It was an old-
fashioned winter, not one in which bare ground and sharp winds make life
outdoors inhospitable. Snow is hospitable-clean, impacted snow; restful
and silent. But there was one spot in the area of white, on which Mab's
eyes were fixed now, with something different in them from what had been
there. Again it was a memory with which Sergeant Fones was associated.
One day in the summer just past she had watched him and his company put
away to rest under the cool sod, where many another lay in silent
company, a prairie wanderer, some outcast from a better life gone by.
Afterwards, in her home, she saw the Sergeant stand at the window,
looking out towards the spot where the waves in the sea of grass were
more regular and greener than elsewhere, and were surmounted by a high
cross.
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