er was all he saw--the face of the one woman.

He spoke to her. He tried to tell her what she was to him, and failed.
She answered gently and in few words. They understood.

He entered the tent and sat upon the couch beside her as she was lying
there, and took her small hand in his, but said no more. From the wood
about them--for it was into the night now--came many sounds, known of
old, and wonderfully sweet to him, but all new and strange to her.

"Ah-rr-oomp, ah-rr-oomp, ba-rr-oomp," came from the edge of the water
the deep cry of the bullfrog; from the further end of the lake came the
strange gobble, gurgle and gulp of the shitepoke, the small green heron
which is the flitting ghost of shaded creeks and haunting thing of
marshy courses everywhere. Night-hawks, far above, cried with a
pleasant monotony, then swooped downward with a zip and boom. It was
not so late in the season that the call of the whippoorwill might not
be heard, and there were odd notes of tree-toads and katydids from the
branches. There came suddenly the noise of a squall and scuffle from
the marshy edge of the lake, where 'coons were wrangling, and the weird
cry of the loon re-echoed up and down. The air was full of the
perfumes of the wood. The setter just outside the tent became uneasy,
and dashed into a thicket near, and there was a snort and the measured,
swift thud of feet flying in the distance. A deer had been attracted
by the fire-light. An owl hooted from a dead tree near by. There was
the hum of many insects of the night, and the soft sighing of the wind
through boughs. It was simply night in the northern woods.

The man rose and went outside, and stood with one hand upon the
tent-pole at the front. He seemed to himself to be in a dream. He
looked up at the moon and stars, and then at the glittering greenery
deepening further out into blackness about him. He looked down toward
the grass at his feet, and there appeared near him a flash of gold.

What Harlson saw was but a dandelion. That most home-like and
steadfast flower blooms in early springtime and later in the season,
with no regard to the chronology of the year. It was one of the
vagrant late gladdeners of the earth that his eye chanced to light upon.

It held him, somehow. It was wide open--so wide that there was a white
spot in its yellow center--and close above it drooped, a beech-tree's
branch, so close that one long green leaf hung just above the petals.