h some one until they neared the light, when she found it was
the dumpy little figure of her cousin Clarice.

As soon as the girls were gone, the man who had broken up their hempseed
sowing advanced a few steps on the pavement. He listened, and that
darker shadow in the angle of the walls was perceptible to him.

"Are you here?"

"I am here," answered Maria.

Rice Jones's sister could not sit many minutes in the damp old building
without being missed by the girls and her family. His voice trembled.
She could hear his heart beating with large strokes. His presence
surrounded her like an atmosphere, and in the darkness she clutched her
own breast to keep the rapture from physically hurting her.

"Maria, did you know that my wife was dead?"

"Oh, James, no!"

Her whisper was more than a caress. It was surrender and peace and
forgiveness. It was the snapping of a tension which had held her two
years.

"Oh, James, when I saw you to-night I did not know what to do. I have
not been well. You have borne it so much better than I have."

"I thought," said Dr. Dunlap, "it would be best for us to talk matters
over."

She caught her breath. What was the matter with this man? Once he had
lain at her feet and kissed the hem of her garment. He was hers. She had
never relinquished her ownership of him even when her honor had
constrained her to live apart from him. Whose could he be but hers?

Dr. Dunlap had thought twenty-four hours on what he would say at this
unavoidable meeting, and he acknowledged in a business-like tone,--

"I did not treat you right, Maria. My wretched entanglement when I was a
boy ruined everything. But when I persuaded you into a secret marriage
with me, I meant to make it right when the other one died. And you
found it out and left me. If I treated you badly, you treated me badly,
too."

He knew the long chin of the Joneses. He could imagine Maria lifting her
slim chin. She did not speak.

"I came over here to begin life again. When you ran off to your friends,
what was there for me to do but take to the navy again or sail for
America? Kaskaskia was the largest post in the West; so I came here. And
here I found your family, that I thought were in another Territory. And
from the first your brother has been my enemy."

His sulky complaint brought no response in words; but a strangling sob
broke all restraint in the angle of the wall.

"Maria," exclaimed the startled doctor, "don't do that. You