THE UNEXPECTED The sun beat down on the prairie, which was already losing its flush of green, but it was cool where Maud Barrington and her aunt stood in the shadow of the bluff by Silverdale Grange.

The birches, tasseled now with whispering foliage, divided the homestead front the waste which would lie white and desolate under the parching heat, and that afternoon it seemed to the girl that the wall of green shut out more than the driving dust and sun-glare from the Grange, for where the trees were thinner she could see moving specks of men and horses athwart the skyline.
They had toiled in the sun-baked furrow since the first flush of crimson streaked the prairie's rim, and the chill of dusk would fall upon the grasses before their work was done.

Those men who bore the burden and heat of the day were, the girl knew, helots now, but there was in them the silent vigor and something of the somberness of the land of rock and forest they came from, and a time would come when others would work for them.

Winning slowly, holding grimly, they were moving on, while secure in its patrician tranquillity; Silverdale stood still, and Maud Barrington smiled curiously as she glanced down at the long white robe that clung very daintily about her and then towards her companions in the tennis field.

Her apparel had cost many dollars in Montreal, and there was a joyous irresponsibility in the faces of those she watched.
"It is a little unequal, isn't it, aunt ?" she said.