of mischief as on that day
when she had called me a big brown bob-cat.

"You must have been having a nightmare in your sleep," she declared.

"I think I was," I replied, testily. "Let me tell you something, Little
Lees, something really important."

"I don't believe you know one important thing," Eloise replied, "but
I'll listen, and then if it is I'll tell you something more important."

"I'm willing to hear it now. Tell me first," I replied, wondering the
while how nature, that gives rough-hewn bearded faces to men, could make
a face so daintily colored, in its youthful roundness, as hers.

"I'm going to start to St. Louis day after to-morrow at six o'clock in
the morning. Isn't that important?"

Was there a real earnestness under the lightly spoken words, or did I
imagine it so? If I had only made sure then--but I was young.

"Important! It's a tragedy! I start west in three days, at eight o'clock
in the morning," I said, carelessly.

Sometimes the gray shadows fall on us when neither sunlight nor
moonlight nor starlight is dimmed by any film of vapor. They fell on me
then, and I shivered in my soul. How could I speak otherwise than
carelessly and not show what must not be known? And how could the girl
beside me know that I was speaking thus to keep down the shiver of that
cold shadow? I suppose it must always be the same old story, year after
year--

till the leaves of the judgment book unfold.

"What was that important something you were going to tell me? What Mat
told me last night when we were watching the moon rise?" Eloise asked.

"That Rex and Mat are going to be married to-morrow evening at early
candle-lighting--'early mosquito-biting,' Bev calls it. Rex has loved
Mat since the day when he joined our little wagon-train out of a foolish
sort of notion that he could protect us children, otherwise his life was
useless to him. But something in his own boyhood made him pity all
orphan children. I think it was through neglect in childhood he became
an invalid at nineteen. He doesn't show the marks of it now."

I paused and looked at the young girl beside me, whose eyes were like
stars in the deepening gloom of the evening. It was delicious to have
her look at me and listen to me. It was delicious to live in a rose-hued
twilight, and I forgot the chill of that gray shadow lurking near.

The next evening was entrancing with the soft air of spring, a night
made purposely for brides. The wedding it