had just found something
that belonged to them and were taking undisputed possession.

There was no need for him to tell her all that he had come to say. She
felt it throbbing through the silence that was as solemn as a sacrament.
Their eyes looked into each other's searchingly. Then, as if from the
beginning of time they had been moving towards this meeting, he
announced simply, "I've come for you, dear. I'm starting on a new trail
now, and I can't go without you."

If that first hour of their betrothal had little need of words, there
was call for much speech and many explanations before he bade her good
night. Mary learned first, to her unbounded amazement, how near he had
come to asking her to marry him more than two years before, when he
parted from her in Bauer.

"But you were not more than half-way grown up then," he said. "I
realized it when I saw you romping around with Norman. I couldn't say
anything then because it didn't seem fair to you. But I had to bind you
in some way. That's why I made you promise what you did about letting me
know if any other man ever crossed your trail. I wanted to claim you
then and there and make sure of you, for I've always felt in some way or
another we belonged to each other. I've felt that ever since I first
knew you, Little Vicar."

There flashed across Mary's mind the remembrance of a conversation she
had overheard on the porch at The Locusts one night, and of Phil's voice
singing to Lloyd, to the accompaniment of a guitar:

"Till the stars are old,
And the sun grows cold,
And the leaves of the Judgment
Book unfold."

But if the faintest spark of jealousy glowed in Mary's heart, it was
extinguished at once and forever by another recollection--a remark of
Phil's as they once waited on the side-track together, going up to Bauer
after the San Jacinto festival. It was just after she had confessed to
the unconscious eavesdropping that made her a hearer of that song.

"Yes," he said, "that time will always be one of the sweetest and most
sacred of my memories. One's earliest love always is, they say, like the
first white violet in the spring. But--_there is always a summer after
every spring, you know._"

Who cares for one little violet of a bygone spring when the prodigal
wealth of a whole wonderful summertime is being poured out for one? So
when Phil said again musingly, "It does seem strange, how we've always
belonged to each othe