Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/62

 in a paper cornucopia, the other resting on the shoulder of a seated man, who glared frozenly, his silk hat nursed in the crook of one arm. Her mother and father, these two. They had posed in wedding finery back there in a forgotten day when love was young and life lay rosy along their path. Dully, yet with a dogged insistence, Hilma's imagination began to reconstruct the picture that lay beyond that figured back drop the photographer had arranged behind the stiffly posed bridal couple. The back drop rolled up and she saw these two—the young girl with her cornucopia of flowers, the man with his sacerdotal silk hat—walk down a vista together. She saw the figure of the girl fade as if in twilight—fade until it disappeared altogether, and the man stood beside a graven stone on a cheerless prairie. Then on and on, through the vista imagination painted, the man walked stumblingly, purposelessly; he fell and rose again, fell and struggled to his feet, then went down a last time The girl slowly lifted her gaze to that flower-blown knoll above the creek where yesterday she had dug a grave,—the end of the