I said 'Good-night,' and I mean it!"
Protesting feebly, Barker finally yielded in a nestling shiver and a
sudden silence. Demorest walked back to his chair. A prolonged snore
came from Stacy's bunk; then everything was quiet. Demorest stirred up
the fire, cast a huge root upon it, and, leaning back in his chair, sat
with half-closed eyes and dreamed.
It was an old dream that for the past three years had come to him
daily, sometimes even overtaking him under the shade of a buckeye in his
noontide rest on his claim,--a dream that had never yet failed to wait
for him at night by the fireside when his partners were at rest; a dream
of the past, but so real that it always made the present seem the dream
through which he was moving towards some sure awakening.
It was not strange that it should come to him to-night, as it had often
come before, slowly shaping itself out of the obscurity as the vision of
a fair young girl seated in one of the empty chairs before him. Always
the same pretty, childlike face, fraught with a half-frightened,
half-wondering trouble; always the same slender, graceful figure,
but always glimmering in diamonds and satin, or spiritual in lace and
pearls, against his own rude and sordid surroundings; always silent with
parted lips, until the night wind smote some chord of recollection,
and then mingled a remembered voice with his own.
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