ctly
marked. And as he was returning he saw the girl seated in her wagon in
the open space between the station and the hotel.

Henley knew what it meant. She had come to meet her lover. She happened
to have her glance fixed on some point in the opposite direction from
him and did not know that he was near. He hesitated for an instant, and
then decided that he would not intrude upon her privacy. There was
something in her attitude of bland and helpless expectancy that probed
the deepest fount of his sympathy.

"Poor, brave little woman!" he mused, as he turned his back upon the
scene and moved on toward his store. "She's having her dream like all
the rest. She may get a fair cut of the cards, and she may not. He ain't
very promising material from the looks of his picture, but it wouldn't
be fair to judge him by that. He may do his part, and the Lord knows she
needs help. I'm too big a failure in the marrying line to object or
offer advice."

Reaching his desk, he applied himself to the writing of some letters
pertaining to his intended trip to Texas, but the pathetic sight he had
of the girl at the station thrust itself between him and his task. She
was his faithful friend. He loved her almost as if she had been a
sister; she had confided in him; only he and she and her little family
knew of what was to take place to-day. How strange to think that she
would no longer be as she was! The wife of a man she had never seen, of
a man whose full name Henley had not even heard.

Just then the still air was stirred by the sportive whippoorwill's call
with which the young engineer of that particular train always announced
with the locomotive's whistle his approach to Chester, and later there
was a sound of escaping steam and the slow clanging of a bell as the
train drew up in the shed. Only a moment's pause, and the train was off
again.

It occurred to Henley that as his store was on the most direct way to
her home Dixie would naturally drive past it on her return, so he went
to the front, taking pains to stand back a few feet from the entrance
that his position might not appear to be by design. He was glad that
Cahews and Pomp were busy in the rear, and he became conscious of the
hope that no stray customer would interrupt him at what seemed such a
grave and important moment. Time passed, and still old Bob and the
ramshackle wagon were not in sight. Henley cautiously ventured to the
door, whence he glanced down the street.