Mrs. Ware was going on with a story about Delavan’s mother and herself and Rhoda heard her mention her “old mammy”! Instantly the girl’s thought flashed to what her father had told her a little while before, and the tears came to her eyes at the realizing sense of how his love had shielded for his wife her memories and her pleasure in them. This, then, was what love was like--but suddenly imagination drove thought away and again she saw the vision of those two young lovers galloping faster and faster, while love plied whip and spur. Then without warning her mind played a trick upon her and there flashed across it a memory of her own--of children playing pirates, herself and the other girls princesses in short dresses and pantalettes, and the man now sitting beside her, a long-legged boy, bearing down upon their palace, singling her out and bearing her away to his treasure cave. They strolled down into the yard, but Mrs. Ware did not like the dew on the grass and went back to the veranda. Rhoda and Delavan idled on through the moonlight. “Do you know what I’ve just been thinking of?” he questioned. “No. How could I? But--” she plucked a red rose and held it toward him, her upper lip lifting in a smile that sent a brightness over her face, “a flower for your thoughts!” He took it, pressed it to his lips and fastened it in his buttonhole. They were passing a great bed of white petunias, gleaming like ghost flowers in the moonlight and sending forth sweet odors that filled the air all round about. “I was thinking,” he began, and to Rhoda the sweetness of their fragrance seemed suddenly to be translated into his tones and to be coursing through her own veins. Never again was she to be able to sense the odor of petunias without darting memory of how he pressed her rose to his lips and said, “I was thinking of that evening when we played pirates. Do you remember?” They had come to the entrance of the grape arbor, at the western side of the yard. It was dark with the heavy foliage of the vines, and Rhoda hesitated an instant as she glanced at the shadows within, checkered here and there with gleams of light, and gave a faint exclamation at his words. A dim prescience, barely realized, crossed her consciousness, as of something, some destiny, waiting for her within those shadows. A broad band of moonlight, shining through the entrance, lay across the seat. “You startled me, a little,” she said, sitting down in the white glow, “because--it’s very curious--I thought of that evening myself, just now!”