“I can’t think what kept me awake on that night,” May said again. She arose and walked toward the Edgley house. “We are betrothed. He has gone to earn money to buy a ship and get the gold. Then he will come for me,” she said in a matter of fact tone. The two women went to the wire fence, crawled over and got into the Edgley back yard. It was nearly midnight and Maud Welliver had never before been out so late. In the Welliver house her aunt and father sat waiting for her, frightened and nervous. “If she doesn’t come soon I’ll get the police to look for her. I’m afraid something dreadful has happened.” Maud did not, however, think of her father or of the reception that awaited her in the Welliver house. Other and more sombre thoughts occupied her mind. She had come on that evening to the Edgley house, intending to ask May to go with her on the excursion to the Dewdrop with the two grocers, and that was now an impossibility. One who was loved by a prince, who was secretly betrothed to a prince, would never let herself be seen in the company of a grocer, and, beside May, Maud knew no other woman in Bidwell she felt she could ask to go on the trip, on which she did not feel she could go alone. The whole thing would have to be given up. With a catch in her throat she realized what the trip had meant to her. In Fort Wayne, in the presence of the grocer Hunt, she had felt as she had never felt in the presence of another man. He was old, yes, but there was something in his eyes when he looked at her that made her feel strange inside. He had written that he had something to say to her. Now it could never be said. In the darkness the two women passed around the Edgley house and came to the front gate, and then Maud gave way to the grief struggling for expression within. May was astonished and tried to comfort her. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” she asked anxiously. Stepping through the gate she put an arm about Maud Welliver’s shoulders and for a long time the two figures rocked back and forth in the darkness, and then May managed to get her to come to the Edgley front porch and sit beside her. Maud told the story of the proposed trip and of what it had meant to her—spoke of it as a thing of the past, as a hopeless dream that had faded. “I wouldn’t dare ask you to go,” she said.