d come
from China some day to marry her and take her away to a house made of
purple velvet and adorned with gold knobs. She had to send a letter to
Prince Quippi every day or he would think she did not love him. Of course,
she loved Uncle Jim best of what she called folks--but Prince Quippi was
big and brown and handsome; and, strangely enough, the only kind of letter
he could read from her was in a flower.

So Leigh dropped a flower on the waters of Grass River every day to float
away to China telling her love to Prince Quippi. And oftenest it was the
tawny sunflower, because it was big and strong and could tell a big love
story. Thus she dreamed her happy dreams until one day Thaine Aydelot,
listening to her, said:

"Why my papa sent my mamma a sunflower once, and made her love him very
much. I'll be your real Prince Quippi--not a--a paper-doll, thinkish one,
and come after you."

"Clear from China?" Leigh queried.

"Yes, when I'm a big soldier like my papa, and we'll go off to the purple
notches and live."

"You don't look like my Prince Quippi," Leigh insisted.

"But I can grow to look like _any_ thing I want to--like a big elephant or
a hippopopamus or a--angel, or _any_ _thing_," Thaine assured her.

"Well, escuse me from any of the free--a angel or a elephant. I don't know
what the poppy one is, but it's too poppy," Leigh said decisively.

There were others in the Grass River settlement who would have envied the
mythical Prince Quippi also. For even at six years of age Leigh had the
same quality that marked her uncle. People must love her if they cared for
her at all; and they couldn't help caring for her. She fitted into the
life of the prairie, too, as naturally as Thaine Aydelot did, who was born
to it. The baby gold was soon lost from her hair for the brown-gold like
the shimmering sunlight on the brown prairie. The baby blue eyes deepened
to the deep violet-blue of overhead skies in June. The pretty pink and
white complexion, however, did not grow brown under the kisses of the
prairie winds. The delicate china-doll tinting went with other baby
features, but, save for the few little brown freckles in midsummer, Leigh
Shirley kept year after year the clear complexion with the peach blossom
pink on her cheeks that only rarely the young girls of the dry western
plains possessed in those days of shadeless homes.

Thaine Aydelot looked like a gypsy beside her, he was so brown, and his
big dark eyes and h