She laid her hands on his shoulders, and as he caught her in his arms,
the light breath of the night breeze brought the fragrance of
honeysuckle to them both. She rested for a moment in his embrace with
the serene feeling that she was at home.

Between them fell a silence but in the bath of silvery light through
the fragrant stillness of dove gray night-tones and cobalt shadows the
girl's eyes were brightly eloquent. Yet after a moment a shade of
troubling thought came into them and the lips moved into the
tremulousness of a self-searching and somewhat self-accusing whisper.

"Turney," she said, "there's one thing that I've got to say--and I
guess it had better be now."

"If it's any fault you're finding with yourself--don't say it," he
protested as his hands closed over her slender fingers. "There ain't
anything that I need to have explained. I reckon I understand what
happiness means and that's enough."

But Blossom shook her head.

"If I'd been straight loyal--like you've been, Turney, I reckon I
couldn't ever have made any mistake. There wouldn't ever have been room
for anybody but you." She paused and then went falteringly ahead. "From
now on there won't ever be. You've known me always and yet even you
can't realize how young and foolish and _plumb_ ignorant I was a year
ago. If I'd been just a _little_ more experienced, it couldn't have
happened. If things hadn't come with such a rush after they began, that
I was just swept along like a log in a spring-tide--it couldn't have
happened." It seemed difficult for her to force the words, but she
obeyed the mandate of her conscience with the candor of the
confessional. "I never had the chance to think--until I came over here
and began looking back. A person like I was doesn't think very clear in
the midst of cyclones and confusions, and I didn't see that the real
bigness was in you--more than in--him. I didn't see it until later. I'd
grown up with you, and I took you too much for granted, I reckon, and
everything he said or did seemed like a scrap out of a fairy story to
my foolish mind."

There was one thing she did not tell him, even now; that she had
learned at last through the lawyers what her husband's connection with
the railroad plans had been. Back of all his fascination there had been
a tarnished honesty, but that secret she still kept to herself.

But she lifted eyes to Turner that were wide open for his reading, and
gravely she said: "I lost my way on