looking at her--will the world to come hold anything
more fair, I wondered. It was years ago, I know, but so clearly I
recall it now it could have been a dream of yesterday. Before me were
the gray rock, the dark-green valley, the gleaming waters of the Neosho,
the silvery mist on the farther bluff iridescent with the pink tints of
sunset reflected on the eastern sky, the quiet loveliness of the May
twilight, and Marjie, beautiful with a girlish winsomeness, a woman's
grace, a Madonna's tenderness.

"Were you waiting for me, dearie? I am a little late, but I am here at
last."

I spoke softly, and she turned quickly at the sound of my voice. A look
of dazed surprise as she leaped to her feet, and then the reality dawned
upon her.

"Come, sweetheart," I said. "I have been away so long, I'm hungering for
your welcome."

I held out my hands to her. Her face was very white as she made one step
toward me, and then the love-light filled her brown eyes, the glorious
beauty of the pink blossoms swept her cheek. I put my arms around her
and drew her close to me, my own little girl, whom I had loved and
thought I had lost forever.

"Oh, Phil, Phil, are you here again? Are you--" she put her little hand
against my hair curling rebelliously over my cap's brim. "Are you mine
once more?"

"Am I, Marjie? Six feet of me has come back; but, little girl, I have
never been away. I have never let you go out of my life. It was only the
mechanical action that went away. Phil Baronet stayed here! Oh, I know
it now--I was acting out there; I was really living here with you, my
Marjie, my own."

I held her in my arms as I spoke, and we looked out at the sweet sunset
prairie. The big cottonwood, shapely as ever, was outlined against the
horizon, which was illumined now with all the gorgeous grandeur of the
May evening. The level rays of golden light fell on us, as we stood
there, baptizing us with its splendor.

"Oh, Marjie, it was worth all the suffering and danger to have such a
home-coming as this!" I kissed her lips and pushed back the little
ringlets from her white forehead.

"It is vouchsafed to a man sometimes to know a bit of heaven here on
earth," Father Le Claire had said to me out on this rock six years
before. It was a bit of heaven that came down to me in the purple
twilight of that May evening, and I lifted my face to the opal skies
above me with a prayer of thankfulness for the love that was mine once
more. In that ho