Timothy had supper at the Vesey farm. It was eight o'clock and the elder Veseys had been gone to prayer-meeting for an hour when Liva discovered that she had lost her locket.
"Lost your locket!" Timothy repeated. It was the first time, for all his striving, that he had been able to mention the locket in her presence. He had tried, all the way home that afternoon, to call her attention innocently to its absence, but the thing that he hoped held fast his intention. "Why," he cried now, in the crash of that hope, "you had it on when I left you under the cottonwood."
"You sure?" Liva demanded.
"Sure," Timothy said earnestly; "didn't—didn't you have it off while I was gone?" he asked wistfully.
"No," Liva replied blankly; she had not taken it off.
When they had looked in the buckboard and had found nothing, Timothy spoke tentatively.
"Tell you what," he said. "We'll light a lantern and hitch up and drive back to the Pump pasture and look."
"Could we?" Liva hesitated.
It was gloriously starlight when the buckboard rattled out on the Plank Road. Timothy, wretched as he was at her concern over the locket, was yet recklessly, magnificently happy in being alone by her side in the warm dusk, and on her ministry. She was silent, and, for almost the first time since he had known her, Timothy was silent too—as if he were giving his inarticulateness honest expression instead of forcing it continually to antics of speech.
From the top of the hill they looked down on the Pump pasture. It lay there, silent and dark, but no longer expressionless; for instantly their imagination quickened it with all the music and colour and life of the afternoon. Just as Timothy's silence was now of the pattern of dreams.