"Love and youth," he said dreamily, "oh, Susan, it's so beautiful! It's Eden come again when God walked in the garden. And it's so short. _Eheu Fugaces_! You've just begun to realize how wonderful it is, just said to yourself 'This is life--this is what I was born for,' when it's over. And then you begin to understand, to look back, and see that it was not what you were born for. It was only the beginning that was to give you strength for the rest--the prairie all trees and flowers, with the sunlight and the breeze on the grass." "It sounds like this journey, like the Emigrant Trail." "That's what I was thinking. The beautiful start gives you courage for the mountains. The memory of it carries you over the rough places, gives you life in your heart when you come to the desert where it's all parched and bare. And you and your companion go on, fighting against the hardships, bound closer and closer by the struggle. You learn to give up, to think of the other one, and then you say, '_This_ is what I was born for,' and you know you're getting near the truth. To have some one to go through the fight for, to do the hard work for--that's the reality after the vision and the dream." The doctor, thinking of the vanished years of his married life, and his daughter, of the unknown ones coming, were not looking at the subject from the same points of view. "I don't think you make it sound very pleasant," she said, from returning waves of melancholy. "It's nothing but hardships and danger." "California's at the end of it, dearie, and they say that's the most beautiful country in the world." "It will be a strange country," she said wistfully, not thinking alone of California. "Not for long." "Do you think we'll ever feel at home in it?" The question came in a faint voice. Why did California, once the goal of her dreams, now seem an alien land in which she always would be a stranger? "We're bringing our home with us--carrying some of it on our backs like snails and the rest in our hearts like all pioneers. Soon it will cease being strange, when there are children in it. Where there's a camp fire and a blanket and a child, that's home, Missy." He leaned toward her and laid his hand on hers as it rested on the pommel. "You'll be so happy in it," he said softly. A sudden surge of feeling, more poignant than anything she had yet felt, sent a pricking of tears to her eyes. She turned her face away, longing in sudden misery for some one to whom she could speak plainly, some one who once had felt as she did now. For the first time she wished that there was another woman in the train. Her instinct told her that men could not understand. Unable to bear her father's glad assurance she said a hasty word about going back and telling Daddy John and wheeled her horse toward the prairie schooner behind them.