ple I
was with in Kansas--"

"I remember them."

"When we used to play at being pioneers in our sunflower shacks."

"Sunflower shacks?" she questioned.

"I was dreaming we were building them again when I was delirious just
after I was hurt, it seems. I thought that I was back in Kansas and
was little again. The prairie was all brown as it is in late summer,
brown billows of dried grass which let you see the chips of limestone
and flint scattered on the ground beneath; and in the hollows there
were acres and acres of sunflowers, three times as tall as either Jim
or I, and with stalks as thick as a man's wrist, where Jim and Betty
and I ... and you, Miss Sherrill, were playing."

"I?"

"We cut paths through the sunflowers with a corn knife," Alan
continued, not looking at her, "and built houses in them by twining the
cut stalks in and out among those still standing. I'd wondered, you
see, what you must have been like when you were a little girl, so, I
suppose, when I was delirious, I saw you that way."

She had looked up at him a little apprehensively, afraid that he was
going to say something more; but his look reassured her.

"Then that," she hazarded, "must have been how the hospital people
learned our name. I'd wondered about that; they said you were
unconscious first, and then delirious and when you spoke you said,
among other names, mine--Connie and Sherrill."

He colored and glanced away. "I thought they might have told you that,
so I wanted you to know. They say that in a dream, or in delirium,
after your brain establishes the first absurdity--like your playing out
among the sunflowers with me when we were little--everything else is
consistent. I wouldn't call a little girl 'Miss Sherrill,' of course.
Ever since I've known you, I couldn't help thinking a great deal about
you; you're not like any one else I've ever known. But I didn't want
you to think I thought of you--familiarly."

"I speak of you always as Alan to father," she said.

He was silent for a moment. "They lasted hardly for a day--those
sunflower houses, Miss Sherrill," he said quietly. "They withered
almost as soon as they were made. Castles in Kansas, one might say!
No one could live in them."

Apprehensive again, she colored. He had recalled to her, without
meaning to do so, she thought, that he had seen her in Spearman's arms;
she was quite sure that recollection of this was in his mind. But in
spite of this--or rather