In a glow over the prosperity which the popularity of the new writer was bringing his magazine, Mr. White wrote to him offering him the position of assistant editor, with a salary of five hundred and twenty dollars a year, to begin with. Of course the offer was to be accepted! The salary, small as it was, seemed to The Dreamer in comparison to the diminutive and irregular sums he had been accustomed to receive, almost like wealth. But its acceptance would mean, for the present, anyhow, separation--a break in the small home circle where had been, with all of its deprivations, so much of joy--a dissolving of the magical Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. Not for a moment, he vowed to Mother Clemm and Virginia, was this separation to be looked upon as permanent. Just so soon as he should be able to provide a home for them in Richmond he would have them with him again, and there they would reconstruct their dream-valley. But for the present--. The present, in spite of the new prosperity, was unbearable! In vain the Mother with the patience born of her superior years and experience, assured them that time had wings, and that the days of absence would be quickly past. To the youthful poet and the little maid who lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by him a month--a week--a day apart, seemed an eternity. In the midst of their woe at the prospect a miracle happened--a miracle and a discovery. It fell upon a serene summer's afternoon when the two children--they were both that at heart--wandered along a sweet, shady lane leading from the outskirts of town into the country. It was to be their last walk together for who knew, who could tell how long? The poet's great grey eyes wore their deepest melancholy and the little maid's soft brown ones too, were full of trouble, for had not their love turned to pain? They spoke little, for the love and the pain were alike too deep for words, but the heart of each was filled with broodings and musings upon the love it bore the other and upon the agony of parting. How could he leave her? the poet asked himself. His cherished comrade whose beauty, whose purity and innocence, the stored sweets of whose nature were for him alone? Into his life of loneliness, of lovelessness, of despair--a life from which everyone who had really cared for him had been snatched by untimely death and shut away from him forever in an early grave--a life where there had been not only sorrow, but bitterness--where there had been pain and want and homelessness and desolate wanderings and longings for the unattainable--where there had been misunderstanding and distrust and temptation and defeat--into such a life this wee bit of maidenhood--this true heartsease--had crept and blossomed, filling heart and life with beauty and hope and love--with blessed healing.