The Montgomery tribune., 1909-12-17

| gagement Tor tins year with some
one else"
When he had gone she went back
to the books and packed them as
though they were hot things that
scorched her fingers.
BY sea, and racing across the east
ern states, watching the prairies roll
away from the window, she recalled
the prophecy. She drew a long
breath of relief that she was free
from the world of the prophet and
out in the world of real things. She
exulted in her freedom. Had she
not surrendered all her things, all
her friends and associates, her sue
cesses, with joyous content in her
strength? ? Was she not stronger than
most women, and was she not ap-
preaching love with triumph of
soul?
She was vibrant as she sat there
and remembered how the struggle
had first begun on board ship, when
he had touched her hand as it lay on
the rail, when they had looked into
the darkness of the night over the
darkness of the sea. She had
swayed toward him and kissed him,
and then caught snatches of his in
coherent love words. She was
singer that had won, a woman whose
name was before the people of two
continents. He knew that. and had
asked nothing of her beyond the mo-
ment. 1t would not be right to ask
her love, he had said.
And the letters he had written
from his field of duty asking moth
ing of her, though they were full of
his loneliness. He wrote of the
plains, of the silence out there, of
his willingness to live alone if she
would only let him hear from her
now and then. In words he had
never asked her to come to him but
she was sure of his desire.
Mountains and valleys and
prairies, she had seen before; the
plains she had never seen. She wait
ed for them impatiently, and in the
morning, when she saw them lumin-
Gus in the dawn, full of mystery,
stretching away as far as sea
stretches, she lay quiet in her berth
and watched the colors spread
toward her from the horizon. All
day she watched the colors-they
made song for her; they were full
of motion. She saw herself riding
horseback through the heliotrope
haze toward the distant, ddim lined
mountains. She saw purple smoke
rising from her own tent that lay
shining in the midst of the color.
At sunset her breath came faster,
she sang to herself in the rhythm of
the wheels that rushed yon to the
destination. She pictured morning
ride to the camp, and the surprise OF
the man who had been so lonely.
She planned that they should be
married at sunset.
The beauty of the hotel, built
like an old Spanish mission, sur
prised her. The Spanish colors of
the sky hung beyond the other end
OF the plaza like banner. Before
she had left the train she had no.
ticed these things. And when she
had come down to the dining room,
and the sky had become a purple
curtain, she hastened her dinner so
that she might sit out of doors and
make for herself new vision of
the tent on the plains.
Just as the. waiter put salad be-
fore her she heard voice outside
the window which stopped her heart.
1t was his voice! 1t was the voice
that had called her into new life,
the voice that had wakened the
primeval woman in her and had
seemed more to her than the music
OF applause or the sound of an
orchestra. There was the same DOW
er in it that she had felt before.
To the surprise of the waiter, she
started to rise from the table. But
the words reached words of a
question; and the answer came in a
woman's lew love laugh, a laugh
with truth in it, of surprised con-
tentment and belief. She might
have doubted the question; the
laugh with the glrlish note in it,