nd tragedy of his two years on the battlefield. Her
pride in his achievements, her joy in his return and her dream of their
future together in a work so full of service, filled his soul with
rejoicing, as the May morning opened for these two its paradise of Youth
and Love.

* * * * *

Asher and Virginia Aydelot had come out on the veranda to look for Leigh.
A moment they waited, then Asher said softly:

"He has forgotten us, but he has come back to the life we love."

"And he will come back to us tenfold more ours, because his heart is
here," Virginia answered, and the two stole softly indoors.

"See the roses Jim brought; they seem to belong to that beautiful vase,"
Virginia said as they stood at the door of the dining room. "I think Jim
must have meant them for Leigh and Thaine."

"Yes, he brought us sunflowers in an old tin peach-can wrapped with a
newspaper, and we had no mahogany dining room set and not so much
cut-glass and china and silver in our cupboard, nor quite such a good rug
on our hardwood floor," Asher replied.

"But we had each other and the vision to see all these things coming to
us," Virginia said as she looked up into her husband's face with
love-lighted eyes. "I wonder where Jim is."

"Jim is present." Jim Shirley came in quietly from the side porch. "He
prepared your wedding supper for you. He buried your first-born, and now
he comes to give you a daughter, He's been first aid to the Aydelots all
along the line, as he will hope to continue to be, world without end, and
a little more."

* * * * *

The homestead on the Purple Notches looks out on a level land stretching
away in an unbroken line to the far westward horizon. Broad fields of
wheat grow golden in the summer sunshine, and acres of dark alfalfa
perfume the air above them. With a clearer vision of what reward farm life
may bring for him who goes forth and earns that reward, the man whom the
Tondo road made a soldier, Caloocan a patriot, and Yang-Tsun a Christian,
has found in the conquest of the soil a life of usefulness and power.

And the father and mother, Asher and Virginia Aydelot, who, through labor
and loneliness and hopes long deferred, won a desert to fruitfulness, a
wilderness to beauty--these two, in the zenith of their days, have proved
their service not in vain, for that they have also won the second
generation back to the kingdom