When she rode out beside her father in the red splendors of the morning, a new gravity marked her. Already the first suggestion of the woman - like the first breath of the season's change - was on her face. The humility of the great abdication was in her eyes.

David left them together and rode away to the bluffs. She followed his figure with a clouded glance as she told her father her news. Her depression lessened when he turned upon her with a radiant face.

"If you had searched the world over you couldn't have found a man to please me better. Seeing David this way, day by day, I've come to know him through and through and he's true, straight down to the core."

"Of course he is," she answered, tilting her chin with the old sauciness that this morning looked a little forlorn. "I wouldn't have liked him if he hadn't been."

"Oh, Missy, you're such a wise little woman."

She glanced at him quickly, recognizing the tone, and to-day, with her new heavy heart, dreading it.

"Now, father, don't laugh at me. This is all very serious."

"Serious! It's the most serious thing that ever happened in the world, in our world. And if I was smiling - I'll lay a wager I wasn't laughing - it was because I'm so happy. You don't know what this means to me. I've wanted it so much that I've been afraid it wasn't coming off. And then I thought it must, for it's my girl's happiness and David's and back of theirs mine."

"Well, then, if you're happy, I'm happy."

This time his smile was not bantering, only loving and tender. He did not dream that her spirit might not be as glad as his looking from the height of middle-age to a secured future. He had been a man of a single love, ignorant save of that one woman, and she so worshiped and wondered at that there had been no time to understand her. Insulated in the circle of his own experience he did not guess that to an unawakened girl the engagement morn might be dark with clouds.

"Love and youth," he said dreamily, "oh, Susan, it's so beautiful! It's Eden come again when God walked in the garden. And it's so short. Eheu Fugaces! You've just begun to realize how wonderful it is, just said to yourself 'This is life - this is what I was born for,' when it's over. And then you begin to understand, to look back, and see that it was not what you were born for. It was only the beginning that was to give you strength for the rest - the prairie all trees and flowers, with the sunlight and the breeze on the grass."

"It sounds like this journey, like the Emigrant Trail."

"That's what I was thinking. The beautiful start gives you courage for the mountains. The memory of it carries you over the rough places, gives you life in your heart when you come to the desert where it's all parched and bare. And you and your companion go on, fighting against the hardships, bound closer and closer by the struggle. You learn to give up, to think of the other one, and then you say, 'This is what I was born for,' and you know you're getting near the truth. To have some one to go through the fight for, to do the hard work for - that's the reality after the vision and the dream."