Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/82

68 "But surely you aren't thinking now of going any farther?"

"Price, we agreed before we left home upon what we were to do."

"I don't mean I want to call off our agreement," Latham said hurriedly. "But" he hesitated, uncertain.

Margaret looked at him and he glanced away. They had passed through the village and were at the foot of the hills beyond it.

Sometimes, since they had made their bargain together, it had seemed to Margaret that Latham welcomed her condition that she must be upon the ship. He appeared to look forward to their being forced close together by hardship, perhaps by more than privation. At other times the condition he had accepted seemed to frighten him; and the present was one of those times. He spoke no longer on the subject. They walked on together past the settlement and came to hillsides at the very head of the fiord where the slope looked out south over the sea and where the green grass was thickly growing about the ruins of stone buildings—the ancient homesteads of the