When at length it really was over and they left the tent, the wagons from town and country-side and the "depot busses" had made such a place of dust and confusion that he took her back to the cottonwood on the slope to wait until he brought the buckboard round. He left her leaning against the tree, the sun burnishing her hair and shining dazzlingly on the smooth silver locket. And when he drove back, and reached down a hand to draw her up to the seat beside him, and saw her for a moment, as she mounted, with all the panorama of the field behind her, he perceived instantly that the locket was gone. Oh, and at that his heart leaped up! What more natural than to dream that she had taken it off to slip his phototype inside and that he had come back too soon? What more natural than to divine the reality of dreams? His trembling hope held him silent until they reached the highway. Then he looked at the field, elliptical tent, fluttering pennons, streaming crowds, and he observed as well as he could for the thumping of his heart:-- "I kind o' hate to go off an' leave it. To-morrow when I go to town with the pie-plant, it'll look just like nothin' but a pasture again." Liva glanced up at him and dropped her eyes. "I ain't sure," she said. "What do you mean?" he asked her, wondering. But Liva shook her head. "I ain't sure," she said evasively, "but I don't think somehow the Pump pasture'll _ever_ be the same again." Timothy mulled that for a moment. Oh, could she _possibly_ mean because.... Yet what he said was, "Well, the old pasture looks differ'nt enough now, all right." "Yes," assented Liva, "don't it?" 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.