Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/317

Rh horses and followed to the cemetery, a long long string of them plodding through the dust that rose like the smoke of a great fire.

Daphne and Kenneth stayed to put the house in order. They cleared away the flowers, and rearranged everything just as it was. Sing Toy helped them in silence. They fixed the centre table just as usual, with the lamp, and they laid there the Colonel's paper and book.

"How about this?" asked Kenneth uncertainly, indicating the old wooden Boston rocker in which Mrs. Peyton had always sat with her work.

Daphne considered, her brows lined.

"Put it just where it has always been," she decided at last. "There! Now we must go before he gets back. He has been wonderful; but now he will want to be alone. Sing Toy must take care of him. You got to make him eat, Sing Toy."

"You bet, I fix 'em," said Sing Toy, cheerfully.

At heart Sing Toy was desolate; and he had woven purple in his pigtail as a sign of grief. So in the gathering dusk they stole away leaving the old ranch house to its shadows of the past.

wrote from Los Angeles for clothes to be sent him and departed for the East. He wrote Kenneth that a sudden and pressing call of business had summoned him. The latter easily found out that the mortgages on the ranch were not due for some time yet. So matters did not press.

The lovers lived a tip-toe. Life was all a gorgeous secret. The most commonplace affairs took on significance. Suddenly all the ordinary things in the world had entered into a conspiracy with them of some splendid sort hidden from the rest of mankind; for whom, indeed, they wore their everyday aspects as a disguise. They were very compassionate toward (a) those who were unmarried and unattached and could therefore be considered as leading a dead-alive sort of life: (b) those who were married and settled down and who consequently lived humdrum, stodgy existences; and (c) those engaged couples who did not