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 perience. Hobbs's attitude towards her was deferential. He seemed to have forgotten the time when he had haled her before Mr. Jerrold for trapping one of his hares. Derek liked him for this, and when he went to the door with him, invited him to come again.

Moved by the friendliness of the moment, Hobbs told Derek that he had just become engaged to Miss Pearsall.

Derek was astonished beyond measure at the news. But he kept a sober face, and congratulated Hobbs earnestly. Yet when he awakened in the night and thought of the union of that posturing, affected girl, and that hard-bitten, fierce man, he shook the bed with cynical laughter.

Late in November came the first snowfall, a deep, yet exquisitely, fragile snowfall, that made a new enchanted world. The bare orchards were weighed with glittering fruit, the windows of the house peered forth like astonished eyes beneath lowering white brows. Peek's deep footprints from the barn were little blue caverns. Yet the sun was warm, and the sky a turquoise blue. The snow certainly could not last.

"I'll tell you what we'll do, Fawnie," said Derek. "We'll get out the little red sleigh; and I'll wrap you and Buckskin in the buffalo robe, and we'll drive to Brancepeth. I need some new shirts and a pair of boots. Do you know, I haven't bought myself a blessed thing since I left Halifax!"

"Darling," replied Fawnie. "I'm surprised at you. As long as you have things for your own back you never notice that baby and I are naked. As a matter of fac', I'm nakeder than I was when I bought those last clothes, for they are wore out and my old ones, too. Winter is here and baby and I are naked. I s'pose I mus' go out to work like Mrs. Orde and make money to buy clothes."

"You do look shabby, and the kid, too," he returned,