Vincent know?"
Fenneben questioned, tenderly smoothing the white hair as Norrie had so
often smoothed his own.

"Is this Vincent my own brother? Will he really own me as his sister?
I've tried to meet him many times. I left his picture on my table that
he might see it if he should ever come. My father separated us years
ago. After we came West he sent me just one letter in which he said
Vincent would never speak to me nor claim me as his sister again. A
brother--a lover--and my baby boy!"

And the lonely woman, overcome with joy, sat white and still beneath the
white moonbeams.

Joy does not kill any more than sorrow. Vincent Burgess and Dennie
Saxon, who came just at the right time, told how they had waited with
Bug at the slab of stone by the bend in the river until they should be
needed.

"It was Dennie who planned it all," Vincent said, "and did not even let
me know. Bug told her my picture was on the table in there. But so long
as her father lived, she kept her counsel."

"I tried four years ago to get Dr. Fenneben to come out here," Dennie
said. And the Dean remembered the autumn holiday and Dennie's solicitude
for an unknown woman.

But the joy of this night, crowning all other joys in the Walnut Valley,
was in that sacred moment when Bug Buler walked slowly up to Marian
Burleigh, sister to Vincent Burgess, lost love of Lloyd Fenneben's
youth--slowly, and with big brown eyes glowing with a strange new love
light, and, putting up both his chubby hands to her cheeks, he murmured
softly:

"Is you my own mother? Then, I'll love you fornever."

Meantime, on this last moonlit June night, Elinor and Vic were strolling
down the new south cement walk, a favorite place for the young people
now.

At the farther end, Vic said:

"Norrie, let's go down across the shallows to the west bluff again. Can
you climb it, or shall we join the crowd down in the Kickapoo Corral?"

"I can climb where you can, Victor," Elinor declared.

"Dennie will never want to come here again. Poor Dennie!"

Vic was helping Elinor across the shallows as he spoke. Up in the Corral
a happy crowd of young people were finishing their last "picnic spread"
for the year. Below the shallows the whirlpool was glistening all
treacherously smooth and level under the moonbeams.

"Why 'poor Dennie,' Victor? Her father had nothing more for him, here,
except disgrace. The tribute paid him at his funeral would have been
forever withheld, if he h