want you to promise
one thing--that you will come to see me, when you are married."

"I'll promise that gladly, and keep it. I am very fond of you."

"Are you?"

"Yes. You said you would like to be the mother of such a son. That was
the kindest thing ever said to me. It makes you my mother."

"Oh," she said, falteringly, as he took her hand. "You will understand
me better in the time to come. Good-bye."

CHAPTER XXIV.

DREAMED OF THE ANGELUS.

Gunhild wrote that she could not spare the money to come out, and to
Milford the summer fell flat and lay spiritless on the ground. He begged
her to let him bear the expense, and for this she scolded him. But she
enlivened him with a suggestion. Near the first of October she would
visit her uncle in the city. "It will make me glad to have you come to
see me then," she said. "And I shall feel that you have held the summer
and brought it with you. Mrs. Goodwin wrote to me as soon as she came
home. She said much about you, and I really think she likes you deeply.
I have been astonished at her. I did not think that she would care for
me more when her house I left, but she does. She is a good woman. Oh,
you remember the Miss Swartz who was with her. Well, she wanted to keep
company with a fiddler in a variety show, and Mrs. Goodwin objected, and
that was not the end of it. The girl went out at night late and married
the fiddler, and Mrs. Goodwin has seen her no more."

There was a lament for the swift flight of the sunny days, by the woman
on the bicycle and the man casting his line into the lake, but to
Milford the time was slow. He remembered having seen a lame cow limping
down the road, with the sluggish hours dragging at her feet, and he told
the hired man that she had come back again to vex him. But time was
never so slow that it did not pass, and one evening the sun went down
beyond the fading edge of September. Milford waited two days longer and
then went to the city; and just out of the fields, how confusing was the
noise and the sight of scattering crowds that were never scattered! But
his sense of the world soon came back to him. He had been moneyless in
many a town, hanging about the gambler's table, feeding upon the chip
tossed by the exultant winner. The woods, the cattle, the green and
purple pictures, musings with his head in the grass, had taken the
gamester's wild leap out of his blood, but he knew that he dared not go
near the vice. He found the Norwe