Months later, this thrice strange tale served to entertain half a score of people who met together in his parlors on his return. They gathered around the story teller--close listeners--intent on every syllable; but one there was who went white as she heard. And when she could see him apart and unnoted, she said: “He is my brother! I saw them take him away. I was hid behind a greasewood bush--I do not know how they overlooked me. I saw it all--everything! Then, those in an emigrant train behind ours, came and took me with them. I was a little child then--only eight; and he--my brother--was younger. I thought they had taken him away and killed him--I never guessed he lived. I know--I am sure this is he. Tell me all you can; for I must go and find him.” * * * * * What that meeting was, no one can say. She found him there surrounded by those who were his nearest and dearest--a brown-skinned wife and little bronze bairns--his! She stood face to face with him--she clasped hands with him; yet a lifetime and all the world lay between. Children of the loins of one father--born of the same mother--these two had nothing in common between them--nothing--save the yearning for a something that was always to lie just beyond. He yielded to her persuasions and went home with her to see the city by the sea of which he had heard much, but knew nothing. It was a visit of but a few days; yet in that time no hour struck for each alike. Try as each would for a feeling of kinship, the other was ever a stranger. She showed him the sights of the city, but he was more and more bewildered by what he saw. At the beach it was better; he seemed to understand the ocean best, though seeing it for the first time. She sought to awaken in him an interest in the things of her world. And to his credit be it said, he honestly tried to respond in the way she would have him. But up and away to the Northeast was all he had interest in or heart for; and so at the end of a week he went back. Going, he pledged himself to come to her every third year for a week’s stay; for “blood is thicker than water,” and though they might never strike the same chord, yet, after all, she was his sister. The years wax and wane. Every third one brings in fulfillment of the promise, the very commonplace-looking brother who is something of a mystery to her metropolitan friends. Time has brought brother and sister a little more closely together, but it will never bridge the chasm. Always there is a restraint, a reserve, which comes from a common knowledge that there are things in his past life he may not tell--yet, which she guesses with an unspoken, unnamed fear. Once (when the bronze-brown woman was dead), he tried to accept civilized life as a finality. The month had not rounded out to fullness when each saw the futility of the attempt.