Sunrays shone upon her hair as she leaned against the arch, her head bowed on her clasped hands, her slender figure shaken with grief. She heard voices and quick treading on the gravel walk. “You haven’t aged at all, though it has been eleven years since I was here.” “Life goes fairly smooth with me; and you have been well, I trust.” She knew that was the Major’s voice, and in the lightning flash of her unerring woman’s instinct she knew the other, as he said: “I have been blessed with sound body, but life has passed roughly with me since my mother died. You have heard it?” “Yes.” “She made home so dear to my boyhood; so real to my after years. She was ever burning there a holy beacon, under whose guidance I always came to a haven and to a refuge.” Then they suddenly came upon Cherokee, partly concealed. “I told him we would find you down among the flowers, you little butterfly. Why didn’t you tell me Robert was coming, he is one of my boys?” and the Major laid his hand affectionately on the man’s shoulder; then, without waiting for an answer, he left them together. Holding out one hand: “I am glad to see you, Cherokee,” and he drew closer. She crimsoned, faltered, and looked toward the ground, but did not extend her own hand. “Thank you,” was all she could utter. He went on: “The very same; the Cherokee of old;” he mused, smiling dreamily, “her own self, like no other.” Moving a step within the vine covert she said with a shadowy smile: “I wish I were not the old self. I want her to be forgotten.” “That is impossible--utterly impossible; I tried to deceive myself into the belief that this would be done; you see how I have failed?” Raising her eyes full to his, but dropping them after the briefest gaze, she said, timidly: “Why have you come back?” “I have come back to mend the broken troth-plight; I have come back to be forgiven,” he answered, humbly. “You have come back to find a wasted youth, a tired woman who has been the victim of a lie, told in the dark, with the seeming verity of intimate friendship. You have come back to find me stabbed by a thousand disappointments, striving with grim indifference, learning to accept, unquestioning, the bitter stone of resignation for my daily bread. I would scarce venture now to spread poor stunted wings that life has clipped so closely that they bleed when they flutter even toward the smallest hope.” He fiercely cried, and clinched his hands together, with one consuming glance at her: “I was to blame, Cherokee, for believing that you had promised to marry Fred Stanhope; Willard Frost is charged with this as well”--he bit his lips hard. “And it was to the same man that I owe the death of innocence.” Her voice was scarcely more than a whisper. Robert Milburn turned upon her a piteous face, white with an intensity of speechless anguish. He staggered helplessly backward, one hand pressed to his eyes, as though to shut out some blinding blaze of lightning.