surged with anxiety, did not even think to be
surprised.

"We did not recognize each other when I found her on the way to Carey's
Crossing three or four years ago, and--I did not know she was married
then."

He sat a while in silence, looking at the window against which the wind
outside was whirling the snow. When he spoke again his tone was hopeful.

"Mrs. Aydelot has had a nervous shock. But she is young. She has a
heritage of will power and good blood. She will climb up rapidly with the
coming on of spring."

How strange it was to Asher Aydelot to listen to such words! He had not
slept for fifty hours. It had seemed to him that the dreadful storm
outside and sickness and the presence of death within were to be unending,
and that in all the world Jim Shirley would henceforth be his only
friend.

"You both need sleep," Carey was saying in a matter-of-fact way. "Bo Peep
will take care of things here, and I will look after Mrs. Aydelot. You
will attend to the burial at the earliest possible time in order to save
her any signs of grieving. And you will not grieve either until you have
more time. And remember, Aydelot," he put his hand comfortingly on Asher's
shoulders. "Remember in this affliction that your ambition may stake out
claims and set up houses, but it takes a baby's hand to really anchor the
hearthstones. And sometimes it takes even more. It needs a little grave as
well. I understood from Shirley that some financial loss last fall
prevented you from going back to Ohio. You wouldn't leave Grass River now
if you could."

Dr. Carey's face was magnetic in its earnestness, and even in the sorrow
of the moment Asher remembered that he had known Virginia all her life and
he wondered subconsciously why the two had not fallen in love with each
other.

And so it was that as the Sunflower Inn had received the first bride and
groom to set up the first home in the Grass River Valley, so the first
baby born in the valley opened its eyes to the light of day in the same
Sunflower Inn. And out of this sod cabin came the first form to its
burial. And it was the Sunflower Ranch that gave ground for God's Acre
there for all the years that followed. It happened, too, that as Jim
Shirley had been the friendly helper at that bridal supper and happy
house-warming more than three years ago, so now it was Jim Shirley who in
the hour of sorrow was the helper still.

* * * * *

The w