One sunny, blowy Sunday afternoon Hilda forsook the light of day and made her way through the dark passage into the cyclone cellar, her candle held high in one hand, the other carefully conveying a battered tray on which were some cakes and half a glass of jelly. On the box table lay a sort of costume into which she got, after she had set down tray and candle before the doll’s fixed stare. The dress was her favorite of all those cast-offs of Miss Valeria’s, a changeable silk, shimmering from green to gold as the plain itself did when the buffalo grass was tall on it and the wind went over. There was a froth of lace and little bright-colored ribbon bows for trimming, exactly like the tossing bells of wild hollyhock or the phlox that bloomed in millions on that plain. Oh, it was a heavenly dress to wear when you were playing Flora MacDonald rowing Prince Charlie across the lake, or Katherine Douglass barring the door against the enemies of King Jamie—barring it with her arm, which they broke as they burst through! To-day it was to be Flora MacDonald, and the _asequia_—the little irrigating ditch—was to be the “practicable water” for the scene. Hilda pulled the veil into place on her hair, swung the long trailing skirts smoothly down her slim little figure and slipped across to open the shutter behind the masking lattice of woodbine stems, her lips already moving, murmuring fragments of high converse, phrases of faith, loyalty, gratitude, renunciation. Her big black eyes swam full, misty with the vision. She had stepped—as always on entering the cyclone cellar—from Texas soil into the realm of romance. The open shutter let in the dancing light reflected from the water, and all checkered with the beautiful thatch of tender green leaves that the woodbine was sprouting. Without coming to earth at all, Hilda felt the joy of it. Leaning ardently forward, she rustled the woodbine stems, whereupon some one, stooping to drink at the spring just outside her casement, started violently, sprang half erect, whirled and stood staring directly into her face. A fugitive! Even to Hilda the fact spoke plain. She—expecting to see, with the vision of fancy, exactly what now confronted her in the flesh—was not greatly startled. The young fellow stood looking at her, his head, with its fair hair flung up, the blue eyes full of terror. While she gazed at him, lips apart, unable to emerge from her spell of fantasy, he reached out vaguely to the dusty, big hat that lay beside him on the grass, got quite to his feet and, with a glance behind him, came up to the woodbine lattice. He laid a shaking hand upon it, peering through at her face, anxiously, doubtfully—and began with a sort of faltering haste: “Can I—could I get—in there? Can you hide me? They’re close after me!”