ly as before, came a new thought, a new
query.

"Is happiness, after all, the chief end of life, How?" she questioned.

"Happiness, Bess?" He halted. "Happiness?" repeated; but there was no
irony in the voice, only, had the girl noticed, a terrible mute pain.
"How should I know what is best in life, I, who have never known life at
all?"

Blind in her own abstraction, the girl had not read beneath the words
themselves, did not notice the thinly veiled inference.

"But you must have an idea," she pressed. "Tell me."

This time the answer was not concealed. It stood forth glaring, where
the running might read.

"Yes, I have an idea--and more," he said. "Happiness, your happiness,
has always been the first thing in my life."

Again silence walled them in, a longer silence than before. Step by
step, gropingly, the girl was advancing on her journey. Step by step she
was drawing away from her companion; yet though, wide-eyed, he watched
her every motion, felt the distance separating grow wider and wider, he
made no move to prevent, threw no obstacle in her path. Deliberately
from his grip, from beneath his very eyes, fate, the relentless, was
filching his one ewe lamb; yet he gave no sign of the knowledge, spoke
no word of unkindness or of hate. Nature, the all-observing, could not
but have admired her child that night.

One more advance the girl made; and that was the last. Before she had
walked gropingly, as though uncertain of her pathway. Now there was no
hesitation. The move was deliberate; even certain.

"I know you'll think I'm foolish, How," she began swiftly, "but I
haven't much to think about, and so little things appeal to me." She
paused and again her folded arms reversed beneath her head. "I've been
watching 'Shaggy,' the wolf here, since he grew up; watched him become
restless week by week. Last night,--you didn't notice, but I did,--I
heard another wolf call away out on the prairie, and I got up to see
what Shaggy would do. Somehow I seemed to understand how he'd feel, and
I came out here, out where we are now, and looked down toward the barn.
It was moonlight last night, and I could see everything clearly, almost
as clearly as day. There hadn't been a sound while I was getting up; but
all at once as I stood watching the call was repeated from somewhere
away off in the distance. Before, Shaggy hadn't stirred. He was standing
there, where you had chained him, just outside the door; but when that
second