Polly glanced at Echo with a smile. "Lord, yes," she replied, "in a way, but I'm only a poor relation--your ma was my ma's cousin or something like that." Echo laughed. "Nonsense," she retorted. "Nonsense--you're my dear sister, and the only daughter that's at the old home now." "But I want a home of my own, like this," said Polly. "Then you'd better shake Bud and give Slim a chance." Polly was too disgusted to answer at once. "Slim Hoover, shucks! Slim doesn't care for girls--he's afraid of 'em," she said at length. "I like Bud, with all his orneriness," she declared. "Why doesn't he come to see you more often?" "I don't know, maybe it's because he's never forgiven you for marryin' Jack." "Why should he mind that?" she asked, startled. "Well, you know," she answered between stitches, drawing the needle through the cloth with angry little jerks, "Bud, he never quite believed Dick was dead." Echo rose hastily. The vague, haunting half-thoughts of weeks were crystallized on the instant. She felt as if Dick was trying to speak to her from out of the great beyond. With a shudder she into a chair at the table opposite Polly. "Don't," she said, her voice scarcely above a whisper, "I can't bear to hear him spoken of. I dreamed of him the other night--a dreadful dream." Polly was delighted with this new mystery. It was all so romantic. "Did you? let's hear it." With unseeing eyes Echo gazed straight ahead rebuilding from her dream fabric a tragedy of the desert, in which the two men who had played so great a part in her life were the actors. "It seems," she told, "that I was in the desert, such a vast, terrible desert, where the little dust devils eddied and swirled, and the merciless sun beat down until it shriveled up every growing thing." Polly nodded her head sagely. "That's the way the desert looks--and no water." Echo paid no heed to the interruption. Her face became wan and haggard, as in her mind's eye she saw the weary waste of waterless land quiver and swim under the merciless sun. Not a tree, not a blade of grass, not a sign of life broke the monotony of crumbling cliffs and pinnacled rocks. Onward and ever onward stretched yellow ridges and alkali-whitened ravines, blinding the eye and parching the throat. "Then I saw a man staggering toward me," she continued; "his face was white and drawn, his lips cracked and parched--now and then he would stumble and fall, and lie there on his face in the hot sand, digging into it with his bony fingers seeking for water." Echo shut her eyes as if to blot out the picture. Its reality almost overpowered her. "Suddenly he raised his eyes to mine," she resumed, after a pause. "It was Dick." In her excitement she had arisen, stretching out her arms as if to ward off an apparition.