She led him to a crudely constructed bench at the foot of a towering elm whose lower branches swept the fore-corner of the roof. "Let us sit here, Kenny dear," she said. "It is where I shall come and sit every night while you are gone away. I shall sit with my back against it and close my eyes and dream that you are beside me as you are now, with your arms around me and your cheek against mine,--and it will be the trysting place for our thoughts." "That's wonderful, Viola," he said, impressed. "'The trysting place for our thoughts.' Aye, and that it shall be. Every night, no matter where my body may be or what peril it may be in, I shall be here beside you in my thoughts." She rested against him, in the crook of his strong right arm, her head against his shoulder, and they both fell silent and pensive under the spell of a wondrous enchantment. After a while, she spoke, and there was a note of despair in her voice: "What is to become of us, Kenny? What are we to do?" "No power on earth can take you away from me now, Minda," he said. "Ah,--that's it," she said miserably. "You call me Minda,--and still you wonder why I ask what we are to do." "You mean--about--" "We can be nothing more to each other than we are now. There is some one else we must think of. I--I forgot her for a little while, Kenny,--I was so happy that I forgot her." "Were ever two souls so tried as ours," he groaned, and again silence fell between them. Kneeling at the window from which Viola had peered so short a time before, looking down upon the figures under the tree, was Rachel Carter. She could hear their low voices, and her ears, made sharp by pain, caught the rapturous and the forlorn passages breathed upon the still air. She arose stiffly and drew back into the darkness, out of the dim, starlit path, and standing there with her head high, her arms outspread, she made her solemn vow of self-renunciation. "I have no right to stand between them and happiness. They have done no wrong. They do not deserve to be punished. My mind is made up. To-morrow I shall speak. God has brought them together. It is not for me to keep them apart. Aye, to-morrow I shall speak." Then Rachel Carter, at peace with herself, went back to her bed across the hall and was soon asleep, a smile upon her lips, the creases wiped from between her eyes as if by some magic soothing hand. CHAPTER XXIX THE ENDING At crack-o'-day Kenneth rode out of his stable-yard on Brandy Boy, and went cantering away, followed on foot by the excited Zachariah, bound for the parade ground where the "soldiers" were to concentrate. The rider turned in his saddle to wave farewell to the little group huddled at Rachel's gate,--three tall women who waved back to him. Rounding the bend, he sent a swift glance over his shoulder. There was but one figure at the gate now; she blew a kiss to him.