e seat under a bower of sweet white honeysuckle and sat
down beside her husband.

"The same Bo Peep of the old Virginia days, only he was a half-grown boy
then," she said, watching the Negro bending above his violin. "How
faithfully he has served Dr. Carey all these years. He's past forty now.
Asher, we are all getting along."

"With a boy nineteen tonight, how can it be otherwise?" Asher replied.
"But when the Careyville crowd gets here I'm going to ask you for a dance,
anyhow, Miss Thaine."

Virginia stood in the moonlight and looked out over the prairie slumbering
in a silver-broidered robe of evening mist.

"How fast the years have gone. Do you remember the night in the old Thaine
home in Virginia when you were our guest--too sick to dance?" she asked.

Asher caught her arm and drew her to the seat beside him.

"I remember the jessamine vines and the arbor at the end of the rose
garden."

"We are not old until we forget our own romance days," Virginia said. "You
were my hero that night. You are my hero still."

"Even with a son as old now as I was that night? The real romance of the
prairie, you've said it often, Virgie, is Thaine Aydelot's romance.
There's little chance for the rest of us."

The coming of the guests just then called the host and hostess to the
parlor, and the evening's festivities began.

In the building of the Aydelot home there was a memory of the old
farmhouse beside the National pike road in Ohio and the old Thaine mansion
house of the South. The picture the mirage had revealed to Virginia
Aydelot on the afternoon when she rode the long lonely miles from
Wykerton with John Jacob's message of hope in her keeping--that wonderful
mirage picture had grown toward a reality with the slowly winning years.
Tonight, with the lighted rooms and the music of the violin, and the sound
of laughter and the rhythm of dancing feet, and outside the May moonlight
on the veranda with its vine-draped columns, and the big elm trees
throwing long shadows down the lawn, with the odor of plowed fields and
blossoming grain and shrub mingled with the perfume floating from the
creamy catalpa blooms in the shadowy grove, all made a picture not
unworthy to hang beside the painting of an Ohio landscape or an old
Virginia mansion.

"Here's where the forty-niners get the best of it," Jim Shirley declared,
as the older men gathered about the veranda steps. "We're dead certain of
ourselves now. We're not like those