“Eloise, youth may have a charm that is all its own,” I said to my wife, “but I wonder if it really matches the enduring charm of age when one looks back on busy years of service.”

Eloise smiled up at me—­the same gracious smile that has lighted all my days with her.

“You are a dreamer still, Gail.  But dreams do so sweeten life and keep the fires of romance forever burning.”

“When did romance begin with you, Little Lees?” I asked.

“I think it was on that day when I came bounding up to the door of the old San Miguel church,” Eloise replied, “and saw you looking like a big, brown bob-cat, or something else, that might have slept in the Hondo ’Royo all your life.  But withal a boy so loyal to the helpless that you were willing to fight for me against an assailant bigger than yourself.  You became my prince in that hour, and all my dreams since then have been of you.  When did romance begin with you, or have you forgotten in the busy years of a life swallowed up in mercantile pursuits?”

“My life may have been, as you say, swallowed up in building trade that builds empire, but I have never forgotten the things that make it fine to me,” I answered her.  “Romance for me began one day, long ago, out on the parade-ground at Fort Leavenworth.  I’ve been a Vanguard of the Plains since then, bull-whacker for the ox-teams that hauled the commerce of the West; cavalryman in hard-wearing Indian campaigns that defended the frontier; and merchant, giving measure for measure always, like that grand man who taught me the worth of business—­Esmond Clarenden.”

“On the parade-ground?  How there?” Eloise asked.

“It came the day that I first knew we were to go with Uncle Esmond to Santa Fe—­for you.  We didn’t know that it was for you then.  I think I was born again that day into a daring plainsman, who had been a sort of baby-boy before.  I sat with Mat and Beverly on the edge of the parade-ground, when I looked up to see, with a boy’s day-dreaming eyes, somewhere this side of misty mountain peaks, a vision of a cloud of golden hair about a sweet child face, with dark eyes looking into mine.  That vision stayed with me until, one morning, fifty years ago, on the rim of the Grand Canon—­you looked into my eyes again and I knew my life dream had come true.”

I rose and, bending over my wife’s cloud of beautiful silvery hair, I kissed her gently on each fair cheek.

“Gail, why not take the old trail for our golden-wedding anniversary—­a long journey, clear to the mountains?” Eloise suggested.

“There is no trail now; only its ghost haunting the way,” I replied, “but, Little Lees, I don’t believe that we who look back on so many happy years, after the stormy ones of early life, could find any other path half so dear to us as that long path we knew in childhood and early youth, and the one we followed together in our first years of mature womanhood and manhood.”