"June Reed!" rebuked her mother sharply above the laughter which the proposal provoked. But under the hand of the night the widow blushed warmly, and with a little stirring of the treasured leaves of romance in her breast. She _had_ thought of trying for the doctor, for she was only forty-seven, and hope lives in the female heart much longer than any such trifling term. They sat and talked over the change this belated news would make in the doctor's fortunes, and the men smoked their pipes, and the miller's wife suggested tea. But nobody wanted to kindle a fire, so she shivered a little and went off to bed. The night wore on, Comanche howling and fiddling as it never had howled and fiddled before. One by one the doctor's friends tired of waiting for him and went to bed. Walker, William Bentley, and Agnes were the last of the guard; the hour was two o'clock in the morning. "I believe you'd just as well go to bed, Miss Horton," suggested Bentley, "and save the pleasure of congratulating him until tomorrow. I can't understand why he doesn't come back." "I didn't know it was so late," she excused, rising to act on his plainly sensible view of it. "Walker and I will skirmish around and see if we can find him," said Bentley. "It's more than likely that he's run across some old friend and is sitting talking somewhere. You've no notion how time slips by in such a meeting." "And perhaps he doesn't know of his good fortune yet," she suggested. "Oh, it's all over town long ago," Walker put in. "He knows all about it by this time." "But it isn't like him to keep away deliberately and shun sharing such good news with his friends," she objected. "Not at all like him," agreed Bentley; "and that's what's worrying me." She watched them away until the gloom hid them; then went to her compartment in the tent, shut off from the others like it by gaily flowered calico, such as is used to cover the bed-comforts of the snoring proletariat. It was so thin that the light of a candle within revealed all to one without, or would have done so readily, if there had been any bold person on the pry. There she drew the blanket of her cot about her and sat in the dark awaiting the return of Bentley and Walker. There was no sleep in her eyes, for her mind was full of tumult and foreboding and dread lest something had befallen Dr. Slavens in the pitfalls of that gray city, the true terrors and viciousness of which she could only surmise. Bentley and Walker went their way in silence until they came to the lights. There was no thinning of the crowds yet, for the news in the midnight extra had given everybody a fresh excuse for celebrating, if not on their own accounts, then on account of their friends. Had not every holder of a number been set back one faint mark behind the line of his hopes?