Then after the last note died away and there was only the moaning of the wind, he said simply, “Thank you, Miss Carrington. I am glad you sang it at the Lone Hollow harvest home.”
“I would never have played it here for any one else,” said Harry presently. “These things are not to be undertaken casually, but she—well, I felt they had to listen, and I did the best that was in me. I think it was her clean-hearted simplicity.”
It was some time afterward when I led Grace out and spent a blissful ten minutes swinging through the mazes of a prairie dance, before we found a nook under dark spruce branches from the big coulée, where Grace listened with interest while I told her of our experiences in the Dominion. The background of somber sprays enhanced her fair beauty, and her dress, which, though there was azure about it, was of much the same color, melted into the festoon of wheat stalks below. The French-Canadian was playing another of his weird waltzes, and it may have been this that reminded me, for now I remembered how I had seen her so before.
“You will not laugh, I hope, when I tell you that all this seems familiar,” I said hesitatingly. “Sometimes in a strange country one comes upon a scene that one knows perfectly, and we feel that, perhaps in dreams, we have seen it all before. Why it is so, I cannot tell, but once in fancy I saw you with a dress exactly like the one you are wearing 75 now, and the tall wheat behind you. Of course, it sounds ridiculous, but, as Harry says, we do not know everything, and you believe me, don’t you?”
Grace’s face grew suddenly grave, and there was a heightened color in it as she answered: “Your friend is a philosopher, besides a fine musician, and I quite believe you. I have had such experiences—but I think these fancies, if fancies they are, are best forgotten. Still, tell me, did you dream or imagine anything more?”
“Yes,” I said, still puzzled as a dim memory came back, “I saw your father too. He seemed in trouble, and I was concerned in it. This I think was on the prairie, but there were tall pines too; while across the whole dream picture drove an alternate haze of dust and snow.”
Grace shivered as though the relation troubled her, and was silent until she said with a smile:
“It must be that ghostly music. Louis of Sapin Rouge has missed his vocation. We will talk no more of it. You once did me a kindness; I wonder whether you would repeat it.”
“I would go to the world’s end,” I commenced hotly, but stopped abashed as she checked me with a gesture, though I fancied that she did not seem so displeased at my boldness as she might have been. Then she answered, smiling:
“I thought you were too staid and sensible for such speeches, and they hardly become you, because of course you do not mean it. It is nothing very serious. There are signs of bad weather, and my aunt is not strong, so, as Miss Lyle presses us, we shall stay here until to-morrow noon, and I want you to ride over and tell my father. He might grow uneasy about me—and for some reason I feel uneasy about him, while, as he has been ailing lately, I should not like for him to venture across the prairie. It seems 76 unfair to ask you, but you are young and strong; and I should like you to meet him. He has his peculiarities, so our neighbors say, but he has ever been a most indulgent parent to me, and he can be a very firm friend. You will do this, as a favor, won’t you?”