"I've always loved them since the day you sent me the little one in a letter," she said in a low voice, as if some one might overhear. "I thought you had forgotten me and the old war days. I wasn't very happy then." There was a quiver of the lip that hinted at the memory of intense sorrow. "I had gone up to the spring in that cool little glen in the mountain behind our home, you know, when a neighbor's servant boy, Bo Peep, Boanerges Peeperville, he named himself, came grinning round a big rock ledge with your letter. Just a crushed little sunflower and a sticky old card, the deuce of hearts. I knew it was from you, and I loved the sunflower for telling me so. Were you near here then? This land looks so peaceful and beautiful to me, and homelike somehow, as if we should find some neighbors just over the hill that you say isn't there." "Neither the hill nor the neighbors, yet, although settlers will be coming soon. We won't be lonesome very long, I'm sure." Asher shifted the reins to his other hand and held the little white fingers close. "It wasn't anywhere near here. It was away off in the southwest corner of--nowhere. I was going to say a shorter word, for that's where we were. I took that card out of an old deck from the man nearest me. The Comanches had fixed him, so he didn't need it in his game any more. There were only two of us left, a big half-breed Cheyenne scout and myself. I picked the sunflower from the only stalk within a hundred miles of there. I guess it grew so far from everything just for me that day. Weak as I was, I'll never forget how hopefully it seemed to look at me. The envelope was one mother had sent me, you remember. I told the Cheyenne how to start it to you from the fort. He left me there, wounded and alone--'twas all he could do--while he went for help about a thousand miles away it must have seemed, even to an Indian. I thought it was my last message to you, dearie, for I never expected to be found alive; but I was, and when you wrote back, sending your letter to 'The Sign of the Sunflower,' Oh, little girl, the old trail blossom was glorified for me forever." He broke off so suddenly that his wife looked up inquiringly. "I was thinking of the cool spring and the rocks, and that shady glen, and the mountains, and the trees, and the well-kept mansion houses, and servants like Bo Peep to fetch and carry--and here--Virginia, why did you let me persuade you away from them? Everything was made ready for you there. The Lord didn't do anything for this country but go off and leave it to us." "Yes, to us. Here is the sunflower and the new home in the new West and Asher Aydelot. And underfoot is the prairie sod that is ours, and overhead is heaven that kept watch over you for me, and over both of us for this. And I persuaded you to bring me here because I wanted to be with you always." "You can face it all for me?" he asked.