"When I send you the little sunflower letter Prince Quippi never answered you may come back," Leigh said lightly, but the tears were too near for the promise to seem trivial. "What is the other thing?" "I want you just once to let me kiss you, Leigh. It's our good-by kiss forever. Hereafter we are only friends, old chums, you know. Will you let me be your lover for one minute up here on the Purple Notches, where the whole world lies around us and nobody knows our secret? Please, Leigh. Then I'll go away and be a man somewhere in the big world that's always needing men." Leigh leaned toward him, and he held her close as he kissed her red lips. In all the stormy days that followed the memory of that moment was with him. A moment when love, in all its purity and joy, knew its first realization. The next day Leigh Shirley made butter all the morning, and in the afternoon she tried to retouch her sketch of sunflowers as she had seen the shadows dull the brightness of their petals in the valley below the Purple Notches. The same day Thaine Aydelot left home for the winter, taking the memory of the most sacred moment of his life with him out into the big world that is always needing men. CHAPTER XVIII REMEMBERING THE MAINE The Twentieth Kansas was fortunate in opportunity, and heroic in action, and has won a permanent place in the hearts of a grateful people. --William McKinley. The sunny plains of Kansas were fair and full of growing in the spring of 1898. The alfalfa creeping out against the weeds of the old Cloverdale Ranch was green under the April sunshine. The breezes sweeping down the Grass River Valley carried a vigor in their caress. The Aydelot grove, just budding into leaf, was full of wild birds' song. All the sights and sounds and odors of springtime made the April day entrancing on the Kansas prairies. Leigh Shirley had risen at dawn and come up to the grove in the early morning. She tethered her pony to graze by the roadside, and with her drawing board on a slender easel she stood on the driveway across the lakelet, busy for awhile with her paints and pencil. Then the sweetness of the morning air, the gurgling waters at the lake's outlet, once the little draw choked with wild plum bushes, and the trills of music from the shimmering boughs above her head, all combined to make dreaming pleasant. She dropped her brushes and stood looking at the lake and the bit of open woodland, and through it to the wide level fields beyond, with the river gleaming here and there under the touch of the morning light.