again
mention that act which I have so long regretted. The past is past. A
woman's real love is for to-day and to-morrow, when with her own eyes
and her own hear-r-rt she has chosen honorably, sir-r--honor-r-ably! I
bid you good evening, Mr. Gar-r-r-dner. I request you never to speak
of that incident again!"

Nor did he, so far as known.

But when Wid himself, chuckling innocently, had passed on down toward
the gate with the loaf of bread which Annie was sending over to Mary
Gage for her evening meal, Sarah Davidson was passing up the road
toward the school house--entirely forgetting to turn to the left toward
Nels Jensen's, where she boarded.

She was wiping away large, ponderous tears--tears of joy that the world
had in it love of men and women--that God, after all, did know--that
the world still was as it was in the beginning, incapable of
destruction even by war, incapable of diversion from the plan of peace
and hope. She guessed so much--and guessed the future of Mary Gage's
life--from data meager enough, but which may have served.

What she saw on the single, unsigned page, and what opened all the
fountains of emotion in her own really gentle soul, was a part of what
Mary once had heard come to her in a world of darkness. The words now
were written by herself in a world of light.

She had promised him when he went away that, if ever everything was
clear in her own mind regarding what was past, she might write to him
one day. So now she had written:

"Only thoughts of you remain
In my heart where they have lain;
Perfumed thoughts of you, remaining,
A hid sweetness, in my brain.
Others leave me; all things leave me:
You remain."

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sagebrusher, by Emerson Hough

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