“I hope you will stay with us now.”

I didn’t know what I really did hope for.  I was no longer a boy, but a young man in the very best of young manhood’s years.  I had seen this girl ride away from me without one good-by word or glance.  I had heard her message to me through Little Blue Flower.  I had suffered and outgrown all but the scar.  And now one touch of her hand, one smile, one look from her beautiful eyes, and all the barrier of the years fell down.  I wondered vaguely now about Beverly’s wish to turn Dog Indian if things became too monotonous.  I wondered about many things, but I could not think anything.

“I have no present plans.  Father Josef and Esmond Clarenden thought it would be well for me to come up to Kansas and look at green prairies instead of red mesas for a while; to rest my eyes, and get my strength again—­which I have never lost,” Eloise said, with a smile.  “And Jondo says—­”

She did not tell me what Jondo had said, for Beverly and Mat and the two rollicking boys joined us just then and we talked of many things of the earlier years.

I cannot tell how that June slipped by, nor how Eloise, in the full bloom of her young womanhood, with the burdens lifted from her heart and hands, was no more the clinging, crushed Eloise who had sat beside me in the church of San Miguel, but a self-reliant and deliciously companionable girl-woman.  With Beverly she was always gay, matching him, mood for mood; and if sometimes I caught the fleeting edge of a shadow in her eyes, it was gone too soon to measure.  I did not seek her company alone, because I knew that I could not trust myself.  Over and over, Jondo’s words, when he had told me the story of Mary Marchland, came back to me: 

“And although they loved each other always, they never saw each other again.”

Nobody, outside of those touched by it, knew Jondo’s story, except myself.  He was Theron St. Vrain’s brother, yet Eloise never called him uncle, and, except for the one mention of her father’s grave, she did not speak of him.  He was not even a memory to her.  And both men’s names were forever stained with the black charge against them.

One evening in late June, Uncle Esmond called me into council.

“Gail, Rex leaves to-morrow for the new store at Burlingame, Kansas.  It is two days out on the Santa Fe Trail.  Bev will go with him and stay for a while.  I want you to drive through with Mat and the children and Eloise a day or two later.”

“Eloise?” I looked up in surprise.

“Yes; she will visit with Mat for a while.  She has had some trying years that have taxed her heavily.  The best medicine for such is the song of the prairie winds,” Uncle Esmond replied.

“And after that?” I insisted.

“We will wait for ‘after that’ till it gets here,” my uncle smiled as he spoke.  “There are more serious things on hand than where out Little Lees will eat her meals.  She seems able to take care of herself anywhere.  Wonderfully beautiful and charming young woman she is, and her troubles have strengthened her character without robbing her of her youth and happy spirits.”