I waited." She gave a little scream of terror and started away trembling with shame and confusion, but a large, masculine hand shot out and grasped the little, cold fingers and drew tliem gently through his arm.
"Come along, little M'oman," he said, leading her half unwillingly out through the echoing spaces into the gayly lighted street.
Then he spoke again: "I s'pose I'm no great shakes of a man to look at, but I've missed most o' the things that go to the makin' of a man, anyhow. But some ways — lately — since I've seen you, I've got to thinkin' that maybe there was somcthin' for me yet to look fo'ward to. I don't expect you could care for me right off. Wouldn't be natural. But I'd wait a year, or two years, for that matter. I've waited all my life for somethin' like this, and I can wait a little longer if — if I have to."
The unconscious pathos of those last words smote the tender heart of his listener. Still he must know the whole truth.
"There was some one else once," she said hesitatingly.
"Yes, Archie?" he asked, compassionately looking down at the little pink ear, her face being averted.
"But he died twenty years ago," she breathed the answer out in a regretful sigh.
"I s'pose he was young an' handsome," said her gray suitor gently; "looked maybe like that new dummy we got at tiie store. I've seen you look at that dummy like it was some one you'd known before soraewheres. I bought the coat an' hat oPen it to-day, thinkin" it might improve me some, but what's the use. When a man was born homely to begin with, an' has had all his lifetime to get gray an' bald, he ain't goin' to look purty no matter what you put on 'im."
Then as they stood at the busy corner, where the endless procession of home- goers surged to and fro, and the noisy electric cars whirled around the curve, he added patiently : "But I guess I ought to 'a waited, an' not a" took you by su'prise so. All I ask is that 3'ou'll take time to think about it. I don't ask you to say 'yes' now if you can't. All I ask is that you won't say 'no.' "
And the Little Old IMaid turned up to him the same look and smile that she had worn twenty years ago and said softly, "But I'm not a-going to say 'no', Lemuel."
THE SPECTRE OF THE SANDS
An Episode of Deatn Valley By 1 . Snelley Sutton
IT was a hot, sultry, almost unbearable afternoon. The sun, suspended like a sulphurous ball of fire midway between the glaring zenith and the long, low stretch of desolate sand-hills at the western horizon, seemed to be pressing its brazen cheek to the bosom of the barrenness; and in the dazzling distance of the waste — rising as if in somber defiance of the arid earth and parching sky — like a grim, mute sentinel against the simmering, tremulous background of un- dulating heat-currents, stood a Spanish Bayonet, that white-plumed relative of the yucca, which, save for a few scattered patches of lava and greasewood, afforded the only actual relief to the sand-seared eye.
Here, in this region of death and desolation, even the hardy cactus, so common to other sections of the Great Basin, refuses to subsist; and there are none of the weird, fascinating beauties so characteristic of many porti^is of the broad ]\Iojave. Today, in all the purview of wretched vastness, only the one lone yucca lifted its magic blossom from the torrid earth; and this, to the eyes of two men, a
