t that was all he could make her say. And so he let her go.

The next evening, in the moonlight, she drove him to Petoskey. He had
messages to send and preferred to trust the telegraph office in the
larger town. Returning they swung out along the country roads. The
night was cool here on the hills, under the stars; the fan-shaped glare
from their headlights, blurring the radiance of the moon, sent dancing
before them swiftly-changing, distorted shadows of the dusty bushes
beside the road. Topping a rise, they came suddenly upon his
birthplace. She had not designed coming to that place, but she had
taken a turn at his direction, and now he asked her to stop the car.
He got out and paced about, calling to her and pointing out the
desirableness of the spot as the site for their country home. She sat
in the motor, watching him and calling back to him.

The house was small, log built, the chinks between the logs stopped
with clay. Across the road from it, the silver bark of the birch trees
gleamed white among the black-barked timber. Smells of rank vegetation
came to her from these woods and from the weed-grown fields about and
beyond the house. There had been a small garden beside the house once;
now neglected strawberry vines ran riot among the weed stems, and a
clump of sunflowers stood with hanging, full-blown heads under the
August moon.

She gazed proudly at Henry's strong, well proportioned figure moving
about in the moonlight, and she was glad to think that a boy from this
house had become the man that he was. But when she tried to think of
him as a child here, her mind somehow showed her Alan playing about the
sunflowers; and the place was not here; it was the brown, Kansas
prairie of which he had told her.

"Sunflower houses," she murmured to herself. "Sunflower houses. They
used to cut the stalks and build shacks with them."

"What's that?" Henry said; he had come back near her.

The warm blood rushed to her face. "Nothing," she said, a little
ashamed. She opened the door beside her. "Come; we'll go back home
now."

Coming from that poor little place, and having made of himself what he
had, Henry was such a man as she would be ever proud to have for a
husband; there was no man whom she had known who had proved himself as
much a man as he. Yet now, as she returned to the point, she was
thinking of this lake country not only as Henry's land but as Alan
Conrad's too. In some such place he al