Virginia, who had not slept at all until nearly morning, awoke with a sense of great weariness and then, of even greater anxiety. It seemed strange to her that she should care so much for one whom she had known for so short a time. Perhaps it was because Tom had seemed to need someone to be loving and kind, he was so all alone in the world. Barbara on the contrary, awakened with a consciousness of a delighted anticipation, and springing up, she merrily exclaimed, “Oh, girls, just think! This is the day that you are to meet that nice boy, Benjy Wilson. I wonder at what hour he is to arrive?” A surprise awaited them, for a little later, when the three girls trooped out to the kitchen from which a tempting odor of frying ham and eggs and steaming coffee was wafted, they saw not only the bustling, motherly woman, Mrs. Wilson, but standing near the range, warming his hands over the heat, was a tall, comely youth, dressed in the uniform of a military academy. He glanced up when he heard the girls entering, and it was evident by his expression that his mother had not told him of the near presence of his friend from the East. Leaping forward with outstretched hands, his face alight, the lad exclaimed, “Am I seeing visions? Miss Barbara, this surely cannot be you! Only last week I rode over to your school to bid you good-bye and ask when you were coming to visit your friends in Arizona. I was told that all of the pupils had suddenly departed because of an epidemic, and I deeply regretted not being able to see you and make plans for re-meeting you here on the desert. I little supposed that you would be awaiting me in my very own home.” Barbara laughed. “I do not wonder that you are amazed,” she declared. “We three girls have been living in a whirl of strange adventure of late, and honestly I am not at all sure that we are real. Perhaps, as you first suggested, we may be merely visions, and yet,” she added doubtfully as she sniffed the appetizing odors, “can a vision be ravenously hungry for ham and eggs and coffee? But I am quite forgetting my manners. Doesn’t it seem queer that I had to cross a continent to introduce Miss Virginia Davis to her neighbor, Mr. Benjamin Wilson? This other fair maid with violets for eyes and the dimples we all envy, is, or rather was, my room-mate, Margaret Selover, of whom I have often told you.” Benjy acknowledged the introductions with a grace of manner which he had readily acquired during his year at the military academy, and his fond mother watching the lad, her eyes shining with pride, secretly congratulated herself that she and “pa” had gone without many little things that the money might be put in the broken nosed tea-pot for Benjy’s education fund. “Come to breakfast everybody,” she now sang out in her pleasant, hearty way, “and do eat all that you possibly can for you have a long ride ahead of you.