ld roses opened their red petals,
and wild strawberries were nearly ripe. And still no word of Dick or
Peter Many-Names. The day after the sugar-making was finished they had
gone off together, with a gun and a blanket each, and very little
besides, and the great wilderness had taken them to itself.

After some time had passed, Stephanie grew in a measure accustomed to
Dick's absence. She was so surrounded by affection, and so much
occupied by work, that she had no opportunity for brooding and
melancholy thoughts. She always watched for him, always waited for him.

"I know he will come back to me," she said to Mrs. Collinson, "but how
long, how long will it be? It seems to me that I have waited a long
time already."

But she was not to be left entirely without knowledge of him throughout
the summer. It was one morning in June that she had word of Dick. She
had just finished milking two of the cows, and, having a few spare
moments afterwards, she had hurried down to the edge of that ravine
which ran up through the fields to the very farm buildings themselves.
It had been her wont of late to haunt the edge of the clearing, to roam
whenever she could into the outskirts of the woods, and there wait and
listen for a space, feeling the silence and beauty of the wilds to be,
in some vague sense, a link between herself and Dick.

It was a very fair morning. The distant trees were softened by a faint
haze that gave promise of heat, and the dew was still damp and chilly
in the shadows. There is no more lovely time of the year than June,
when things are ripened to full beauty, and yet young, when each tree
has still its own individual shade of green, not yet merged into the
heavier, denser, universal tint of the later season. And Stephanie
found both peace and promise in the still radiance of the early day.

She paused at the brink of the ravine, watching the tree-creepers with
wide, unconscious eyes. She remembered that morning, now many weeks
ago, when the knowledge, hard, inevitable, had first come to her that
Dick had run away with the Indian; and when for a time she could feel
nothing, think nothing, but that he had left her, his only sister.
Those feelings were softened now; softened with the sure though gradual
growth of her trust and faith in that love deeper than her own, which
could guard and care for her brother through all things. But she
longed for a sight, a word of him, more than for anything else in