rush her hand quickly across her eyes, and knew she
had been weeping. He was ashamed to stand there watching her, but he
could not move. Always, it seemed to him, she was being presented to him
thus strongly against a surrounding halo of light, revealing every
gracious line of her figure and her sweet, clean profile.

He turned his eyes away, but as quickly gazed again; she had
disappeared. He waited, and again she passed between his eyes and the
light, here and there, moving quietly about, seeing that all was in
order, as her custom was when she knew him to be absent.

He saw her brushing about the hearth, carefully wiping the dust from his
disordered table, lifting the books, touching everything tenderly and
lightly. His flute lay there. She took it in her hands and looked down
at it solemnly, then slowly raised it to her lips. What? Was she going
to try to play upon it? No, but she kissed it. Again and again she
kissed the slender, magic wand, hurriedly, then laid it very gently down
and with one backward glance walked swiftly out of the cabin and away
from him, down the trail, with long, easy steps. Only once more she drew
her hand across her eyes, and with head held high moved rapidly on.
Never did she look to the right or the left or she must have seen him as
he stood, scarcely breathing and hard beset to hold himself back and
allow her to pass him thus.

Now he knew that she had been deeply stirred by him, and the revelation
fell upon his spirit, filling him with a joy more intense than anything
he had ever felt or experienced before, so poignantly sweet that it hurt
him. Had he indeed entered into her dreams and become an undercurrent in
her life even as she had in his, and did her soul and body ache for him
as his for her?

Then he suffered remorse for what he had done. How long she had defended
herself by that wall of impersonality with which she had surrounded
herself! He had beaten down the ramparts and trampled in the garden of
her soul. As he stood in the door of his cabin, the place seemed to
breathe of her presence. She had made a veritable bower of it for his
return. Every sweet thing she had gathered for him, as if, out of her
love and her sorrow, she had meant to bring to him an especial blessing.

A shallow basin filled with wild forget-me-nots stood on the shelf
before his mother's picture. Ferns and vines fell over the stone mantle,
and in earthen jars of mountain ware the early rhododendron, w