May put her hands over her face and leaned forward and for a long time she was silent. In the grass the insects kept singing and on a distant street Maud could hear the footsteps of people walking. What a world she had come into when she left Fort Wayne and came to Bidwell! Indiana was not like Ohio! The very air was different. She breathed deeply and looked about into the soft darkness. Had she been alone she could not have stood being in a place where such wonderful things as had just been described to her could happen. How quiet it was in the field now. She put out a hand softly and touched May’s dress and tried to think but her own thoughts were vague, they swam away into a strange world. To go to a theatre, to read books, to hear of the commonplace adventures of other people—how dull and uneventful her life had been before she knew May. Once her father had been in a wreck on the railroad and by a miracle had escaped uninjured and, when company came to the Welliver house, he always told of the wreck, how the cars were piled up and how he, walking over the tops of cars in the darkness of a rainy night was pitched off and went flying, head over heels, only by a pure miracle to land on his feet in dense bushes, uninjured, only badly shaken up. May had thought the tale exciting, she had been stupid enough to think it exciting. What contempt she now had for such weak commonplace adventures. What a vast change knowing May Edgley had made in her life! “You won’t tell. You promise on your life you won’t tell.” May’s hand gripped Maud’s and the two women sat in silence, intent, shaken with some vast emotion that seemed to run over the dry grass in the field, through the branches of distant trees, and that seemed to effect even the stars in the sky. To Maud the stars appeared about to speak. They came down close out of the sky. “Be cautious,” they seemed to be saying. Had she lived in old times, in Judea, and had she been permitted to go into the room where Jesus sat at the last supper with his disciples, she could not have felt more completely humble and thankful that she, of all the people in the world had been permitted to be where she was at the moment. “He was a prince in his own country,” May said suddenly breaking the silence that had become so intense that in another moment Maud thought she would have screamed. “He lived, Oh, far away.” In his own country the father, a king, had decided to marry the prince to the princess of a neighboring kingdom, and on the same day his sister was to marry the brother of his betrothed. Neither he nor his sister had ever seen the man and woman they were to marry. Princes and princesses don’t, you know. That is the way such things are arranged when princes and princesses are concerned.