row we
will be gone. My heart is heavy as lead. I go about, doing things for
the last time, looking at things for the last time, and pretending to
be as matter-of-fact as a tripper breaking camp. But there's a
laryngitis lump in my throat and there are times when I'm glad I'm
almost too busy to think.

I was hoping that the weather would be bad, as it ought to at this
time of the year, so that I might leave my prairie with some lessened
pang of regret. But the last two days have been miraculously mild. A
Chinook has been blowing, the sky has been a palpitating soft dome of
azure, and a winey smell of spring has crept over the earth....
To-night, knowing it was the last night, I crept out to say good-by to
my little Pee-Wee asleep in his lonely little bed. It was a perfect
night. The Lights were playing low in the north, weaving together in a
tangle of green and ruby and amethyst. The prairie was very still.
The moonlight lay on everything, thick and golden and soft with
mystery. I knelt beside Pee-Wee's grave, not in bitterness, but bathed
in peace. I knelt there and prayed.

It frightened me a little, when I looked up, to see Peter standing
beside the little white fence. I thought, at first, that he was a
ghost, he stood so still and he seemed so tall in the moonlight.

"I'll watch your boy," he said very quietly, "until you come back."

He made me think of the Old Priest in _The Sorrowful Inheritance_. He
seemed so calmly benignant, so dependable, so safe in his simple
other-worldliness.

"Oh, Peter!" was all I could say as I moved toward him in the
moonlight. He nodded, as much to himself as to me, as he took my hand
in his. I felt a great ache, which was not really an ache, and a new
kind of longing which never before, in all my life, I had nursed or
known. I must have moved closer to Peter, though I could feel his hand
pull itself away from mine. It made me feel terribly alone in the
world.

"Aren't you going to kiss me good-by?" I cried out, with my hand on
his shoulder.

Peter shook his head from side to side, very slowly.

"_Verboten!_" he said as he put his hand over the hand which I had put
on his shoulder.

"But I may never come back. Peter!" I whispered, feeling the tears go
slowly down my wet cheek.

Peter took my unsteady fingers and placed them on the white pickets of
the little rectangular fence.

"You'll come back," he said very quietly. And when I looked up he had
turned away.

I coul