“I’m willing to hear it now.  Tell me first,” I replied, wondering the while how nature, that gives rough-hewn bearded faces to men, could make a face so daintily colored, in its youthful roundness, as hers.

“I’m going to start to St. Louis day after to-morrow at six o’clock in the morning.  Isn’t that important?”

Was there a real earnestness under the lightly spoken words, or did I imagine it so?  If I had only made sure then—­but I was young.

“Important!  It’s a tragedy!  I start west in three days, at eight o’clock in the morning,” I said, carelessly.

Sometimes the gray shadows fall on us when neither sunlight nor moonlight nor starlight is dimmed by any film of vapor.  They fell on me then, and I shivered in my soul.  How could I speak otherwise than carelessly and not show what must not be known?  And how could the girl beside me know that I was speaking thus to keep down the shiver of that cold shadow?  I suppose it must always be the same old story, year after year—­

     till the leaves of the judgment book unfold.

“What was that important something you were going to tell me?  What Mat told me last night when we were watching the moon rise?” Eloise asked.

“That Rex and Mat are going to be married to-morrow evening at early candle-lighting—­’early mosquito-biting,’ Bev calls it.  Rex has loved Mat since the day when he joined our little wagon-train out of a foolish sort of notion that he could protect us children, otherwise his life was useless to him.  But something in his own boyhood made him pity all orphan children.  I think it was through neglect in childhood he became an invalid at nineteen.  He doesn’t show the marks of it now.”

I paused and looked at the young girl beside me, whose eyes were like stars in the deepening gloom of the evening.  It was delicious to have her look at me and listen to me.  It was delicious to live in a rose-hued twilight, and I forgot the chill of that gray shadow lurking near.

The next evening was entrancing with the soft air of spring, a night made purposely for brides.  The wedding itself was simple in its appointments, as such events must needs be in the frontier years.  All day we had worked to decorate the plain stone house, which the deftness of Little Blue Flower and the artistic touch of Little Lees turned into a spring bower, with trailing vines and blossoms everywhere.

Mat’s wedding-gown was neither new nor elaborate, for the affair had been too hastily decided on, but Eloise had made it bride-like by draping a filmy veil over Mat’s bright brown hair, and Little Blue Flower had brought her long strands of turquoise beads, “old and borrowed and blue,” to fulfil the needs of every bride.