im to the Philippines.

It was not the answer he wanted; but in her happiness, which was
evident to every one, he could not help but take hope. And in the
questions she put to him of life in the tropics, of the life of the
"officers' ladies," he saw that what was in her mind was a possible
life with him, and he was content.

She became to him a wonderful, glorious person, and each day she grew
in loveliness. It had been five years of soldiering in Cuba, China,
and on the Mexican border since he had talked to a woman with interest,
and now in all she said, in all her thoughts and words and delights, he
found fresher and stronger reasons for discarding his determination to
remain wedded only to the United States Army. He did not need reasons.
He was far too much in love to see in any word or act of hers anything
that was not fine and beautiful.

In their rides they had one day stumbled upon a long-lost and
long-forgotten road through the woods, which she had claimed as their
own by right of discovery, and, no matter to what point they set forth
each day, they always returned by it. Their way through the woods
stretched for miles. It was concealed in a forest of stunted oaks and
black pines, with no sign of human habitation, save here and there a
clearing now long neglected and alive only with goldenrod. Trunks of
trees, moss-grown and crumbling beneath the touch of the ponies' hoofs,
lay in their path, and above it the branches of a younger generation
had clasped hands. At their approach squirrels raced for shelter,
woodcock and partridge shot deeper into the network of vines and
saplings, and the click of the steel as the ponies tossed their bits,
and their own whispers, alone disturbed the silence.

"It is an enchanted road," said the girl; "or maybe we are enchanted."

"Not I," cried the young man loyally. "I was never so sane, never so
sure, never so happy in knowing just what I wanted! If only you could
be as sure!"

One day she came to him in high excitement with a book of verse. "He
has written a poem," she cried, "about our own woods, about our lost
road! Listen" she commanded, and she read to him:

"'They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and
rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once
a road through the woods Before they planted the trees. It is
underneath the coppice and heath, And the thin anemones. Only the
keeper sees That, where the ringdov