the Clover valley in Ohio. I remember them yet, although I was so
little when I left there," Leigh said, turning to Thaine.

He shifted the reins, and throwing his hat in the buggy before him he
pushed back the hair from his forehead.

"Leigh, will you let me take you home? I didn't ask Jo after all. Todd
wouldn't wait long enough for me to do that, as I knew well enough he
wouldn't. Don't be mad at me. Please don't," he pleaded.

"Why, I'm glad if you really want me to go with you, but you shouldn't
have staid away this morning."

"I did it on purpose. I knew Todd wouldn't let the chance slip--nor Jo
neither, if I let him have it."

"You let him have it merely because you didn't want the chance today. Your
kindness will be your undoing some day," Leigh said with a smile that took
off the edge of sarcasm.

Thaine said nothing in response, and they climbed slowly to the top of the
bluff and stood at last on the crest of the middle headland.

Below them lay "The Cottonwoods" and the winding stream whose course,
marked by the dark green line of shrubbery, stretched away toward Grass
River far to the southeast. To the westward a wonderful vista of level
prairie spread endlessly, wherein no line of shrubbery marked a
watercourse nor tree rose up to break the circle of the horizon. Over all
this vast plain the three headlands stood as sentinels. In the west the
sunlight had pierced a heavy cloudbank and was pouring through the rift in
one broad sheet of gold mist from sky to earth. Purple and silver and
burnt umber, with green and gray and richest orange, blended all in the
tones of the landscape, overhung now by a storm-girdled sky.

"This prairie belongs mostly to John Jacobs now and it is just as it was
when the Indians called it the Grand Prairie and the old Pawnees came down
here every summer to hunt buffalo. Some day, soon, there will be a sea of
wheat flowing over all that level plain," Thaine said.

"And up here a home with nothing to cut off a fragment of the whole
horizon. Think of seeing every sunrise and every sunset from a place like
this," Leigh said, her face aglow with an artist's love of beauty. "It's
farther to China than I used to think when I dreamed of a purple velvet
house decorated with gold knobs beyond these three headlands."

"I always did want to live on the Purple Notches," Thaine said
reminiscently. "I'm glad we came up here today."

The sound of singing came faintly up from the valley