was not so late in the season that the call of the whippoorwill might not be heard, and there were odd notes of tree-toads and katydids from the branches.  There came suddenly the noise of a squall and scuffle from the marshy edge of the lake, where ’coons were wrangling, and the weird cry of the loon re-echoed up and down.  The air was full of the perfumes of the wood.  The setter just outside the tent became uneasy, and dashed into a thicket near, and there was a snort and the measured, swift thud of feet flying in the distance.  A deer had been attracted by the fire-light.  An owl hooted from a dead tree near by.  There was the hum of many insects of the night, and the soft sighing of the wind through boughs.  It was simply night in the northern woods.

The man rose and went outside, and stood with one hand upon the tent-pole at the front.  He seemed to himself to be in a dream.  He looked up at the moon and stars, and then at the glittering greenery deepening further out into blackness about him.  He looked down toward the grass at his feet, and there appeared near him a flash of gold.

What Harlson saw was but a dandelion.  That most home-like and steadfast flower blooms in early springtime and later in the season, with no regard to the chronology of the year.  It was one of the vagrant late gladdeners of the earth that his eye chanced to light upon.

It held him, somehow.  It was wide open—­so wide that there was a white spot in its yellow center—­and close above it drooped, a beech-tree’s branch, so close that one long green leaf hung just above the petals.  And upon this green leaf the dew was gathering.

The man looked at the flower.

“Is all the world golden?” he said to himself.  And he straightened and moved and went from the tent to where the open was.  He stood in the glade in the moonlight, and wondered at it all.

Here he was—­he could not comprehend it—­here, all alone, save for her, in the forest, miles away from any other human being!  He had wholly loved but two things all his life—­her and nature—­and the three of them—­she, nature and he—­were here together!  It was wonderful!

And there in that preposterous covering of canvas, half hid in the forest’s edge, was Jean Cor—­no, Jean Harlson, belonging to him—­all his—­away from all the world, just part of him, in this solitude!

He wondered why he had deserved it.  He wondered how he had won it.  He looked up at the pure sky, with the moon defined so clearly, and all the stars, and was grateful, and reached out his hands and asked the Being of it to tell him, if it might be, how to do something as an offset.

The night passed, and the sun rose clearly over the forest.  The chestnut setter roused himself from behind the tent, and came in front of it, and barked joyously at a yellow-hammer which had chosen a great basswood tree with deadened spaces for an early morning experiment toward a breakfast.