ut it in my pocket, determined to
find out how it had found its way here.

"Ugh! Let's go," said Marjie, turning to me. "I'm cold in here. I'd want
a home up under the cottonwood, not down in this lonely place. Maybe
movers on the trail camp in here." Marjie was at the door now.

I looked about once more and then we went outside and stood on the
broad, flat step. The late afternoon was dreamily still here, and the
odor of some flowers, faint and woodsy, came from the thicket beside the
doorway.

"It is dreary in there, Marjie, but I'll always love this place outside.
Won't you?" I said, and with a lover's happiness in my face, I drew her
close to me.

She smiled and nodded. "I'll tell you all I think after a while. I'll
write it to you in a letter."

"Do, Marjie, and put it in our 'Rockport' post-office, just like we used
to do. I'll write you every day, too, and you'll find my letter in the
same old crevice. Come, now, we must go home."

"We'll come again." Marjie waved her hand to the silent gray cabin. And
slowly, as lovers will, we strolled down the walk and out into the open
where the ponies neighed a hurry-up call for home.

Somehow the joy of youth and hope drove fear and suspicion clear from my
mind, and with the opal skies above us and the broad sweet prairies
round about us for an eternal setting of peace and beauty, we two came
home that evening, lovers, who never afterwards might walk alone, for
that our paths were become one way wherein we might go keeping step
evermore together down the years.

CHAPTER XII

A MAN'S ESTATE

When I became a man I put away childish things.

The next day was the Sabbath. I was twenty-one that day. Marjie and I
sang in the choir, and most of the solo work fell to us. Dave Mead was
our tenor, and Bess Anderson at the organ sang alto. Dave was away that
day. His girl sweetheart up on Red Range was in her last illness then,
and Dave was at her bedside. Poor Dave! he left Springvale that Fall,
and he never came back. And although he has been honored and courted of
women, I have been told that in his luxurious bachelor apartments in
Hong Kong there is only one woman's picture, an old-fashioned
daguerreotype of a sweet girlish face, in an ebony frame.

Dr. Hemingway always planned the music to suit his own notions. What he
asked for we gave. On this Sabbath morning there was no surprise when he
announced, "Our tenor being absent, we will omit the anthem, and