"Come, sweetheart," I said. "I have been away so long, I'm hungering for your welcome."
I held out my hands to her. Her face was very white as she made one step toward me, and then the love-light filled her brown eyes, the glorious beauty of the pink blossoms swept her cheek. I put my arms around her and drew her close to me, my own little girl, whom I had loved and thought I had lost forever.
"Oh, Phil, Phil, are you here again? Are you—" she put her little hand against my hair curling rebelliously over my cap's brim. "Are you mine once more?"
"Am I, Marjie? Six feet of me has come back; but, little girl, I have never been away. I have never let you go out of my life. It was only the mechanical action that went away. Phil Baronet stayed here! Oh, I know it now—I was acting out there; I was really living here with you, my Marjie, my own."
I held her in my arms as I spoke, and we looked out at the sweet sunset prairie. The big cottonwood, shapely as ever, was outlined against the horizon, which was illumined now with all the gorgeous grandeur of the May evening. The level rays of golden light fell on us, as we stood there, baptizing us with its splendor.
"Oh, Marjie, it was worth all the suffering and danger to have such a home-coming as this!" I kissed her lips and pushed back the little ringlets from her white forehead.
"It is vouchsafed to a man sometimes to know a bit of heaven here on earth," Father Le Claire had said to me out on this rock six years before. It was a bit of heaven that came down to me in the purple twilight of that May evening, and I lifted my face to the opal skies above me with a prayer of thankfulness for the love that was mine once more. In that hour of happiness we forgot that there was ever a storm cloud to darken the blue heavens, or ever a grief or a sin to mar the joy of living. We were young, and we were together. Over the valley swept the sweet tones of the Presbyterian Church bell. Marjie's face, radiant with light, was lifted to mine.
"I must go to prayer meeting, Phil. I shall see you again—to-morrow?" She put the question hesitatingly, even longingly.
"Yes, and to-night. Let's go together. I haven't been to prayer meeting regularly. We lost out on that on the Staked Plains."
"I must run home and comb my hair," she declared; and indeed it was a little tumbled. But from the night I first saw her, a little girl in her father's moving-wagon, with her pink sun-bonnet pushed back from her blowsy curls, her hair, however rebellious, was always a picture.