in pail, and mother rode Aunt Sally's Speckle and carried
the biscuit in a pan on front. Shut your eyes and you can see them come
that way, David, while I sit here with you, talking and feeling that
happy. Don't try to use your right hand that way; I can see it hurts
you. Let me go on feeding you like I am. Don't I do it right?"

"Perfectly, but I want you to bring that cushion over here and put it
under my pillow so you won't have to lift my head. That's right. Now I
want to see you eat. You can't feed me and yourself at the same time.
You won't? Then we'll take it turn about."

"How have you managed these days? Did Aunt Sally feed you? Oh, I don't
believe you ate anything. You couldn't, could you?"

She spoke so sadly, he laughed. "It's a lucky thing you sent for the
bishop instead of the doctor, or I would have had no wife and would have
starved to death. I couldn't have survived another day."

Again she laughed out, as she seemed so suddenly to have learned to do.
"And I would have stayed away and let you starve to death? You must
open your mouth, David, and not try to talk now."

"Ah, no, that's enough. We've a thousand things to say and plans to
make. You eat while I talk. When I am up, we must find some one to stay
with your mother. She should not be left alone." Cassandra paled a
little. He was watching her face. "You will be staying up here with me,
you know, all the time."

"Yes--I know." Her throat seemed to tighten, and she looked off toward
the hills, as her way was.

"Don't you like the thought of staying up here with me? Make your
confession, dearest one." He drew her down to look in his eyes. "It's
done. We are man and wife."

Her eyes swam with tears, but her lips smiled. "I do. I do want to bide
with you. All the way before me now looks like a long path of
light--like what I have dreamed sometimes when the moon shines long down
the mists at night. Only one place--I can't quite see--is it shadow or
not. Perhaps it's only the thought of mother down there alone."

She spoke dreamily and with the same look of seeing things beyond,
except that now she fixed her eyes, not on the mountain top, but on his
own.

"Is it in my eyes you see the long path of light? Are we together in it?
I see you always with the light about you. I saw you so first in your
own home before the blazing fire--such a hearth fire as I had never seen
before. You have appeared to me in my dreams with light about you ever
since