by longer blanks, and stopped. The cotton
wood leaves ceased to rustle and flutter. Only the twang of the night
hawk's wing hummed through the stillness; and the distracted tread no
longer paced the Mission Parlor. When Eleanor came back from across
the hall, she shut the Library door softly.

"She is praying," she said.

Wayland had been extemporizing a morris chair into a lounge with his
Service coat for a pillow. He threw a navajo rug across. Then, he
faced her. The look of masterdom had both hardened and softened. She
did not know that the hunger-light of her own face hardened that
hardness; and she gazed through the darkened window to hide her tears.
He stood beside her with his arms folded. A convulsive shudder shook
her frame. Wayland tightened his folded arms. Sympathy is so easy.
The sense of her nearness, of her trust, of the warm living fire of her
love was pushing him not over the precipice but into the battle, out
beyond the firing line. What did one man matter in this big fight
anyway? They heard the sibilant hush of the River flood-tide; and the
warm June dark enveloped them as in a caress. They could see the sheet
lightning glimmer on the bank of cumulous clouds behind the Holy Cross.
The humming night-hawk, up in the indigo of mid-heaven, uttered a
lonely, far, fading call, as of life in flight; and a rustle of wind,
faint as the brushing of moth wings, passed whispering into silence.

"You don't really think death is the end of all, do you?" she asked.

Wayland could not answer. If she had looked, she would have seen his
face white and his eyes shining with a strange new light. He drew back
a little in the dark of the window casement, with his hand on the sill.
It touched hers and closed over it. Then, somewhere from the dark came
a night-sound heard only in June, the broken dream-trill of a bird in
its sleep. When she spoke, her voice was low, keyed as the dream-voice
from the dark.

"Where did the spray of flowers you gave me come from?"

"Sprig I'd stuck in my hat band."

"Was that all? Didn't you mean to tell me more?"

"It's a pearl everlasting blossom," answered Wayland.

She waited. He heard the slow ticking of his own watch.

"I was dreaming of your face," he blundered out, "and when I wakened,
the thing had blown down on--the hammock." It was a clumsy subterfuge;
and he knew that her thought meeting his half-way divined his dream.

The wind passed whispering int