Miss Estill gave a sigh of gratification as her glance swept the apartment, and rested out on the shady, well-kept lawn, where the hum of bees and songs of wild-birds seemed so wholly in keeping with the tone of happiness and industry which pervaded the Warlow household.
"How strange it seems that you have been here so short a time! It is almost like enchantment--this evolving such a perfect home from the wild, lonesome prairies and tangled woodland, where the wolf and buffalo roamed unmolested not two short years ago."
"We have to thank nature for the trees and flowers, the vines also, Miss Estill; but you see we had little else to occupy our time but the improvements of our new home; though I believe we can truly say that we have not been idle the past year," replied Clifford.
"It is wonderful what a change your taste and energy have made in that brief time. We can not blame our Eastern friends, who never have beheld a wide, desolate prairie transformed into such a charming home-land as this in a short year, if they do vilify the average Kansan, and tax him with boastfulness and other vices not akin to truth."
At request of her guests, Maud was soon seated at the rich, mellow-toned piano, and the strains of "The Bridge" floated out through the open windows, as her sweet contralto rose, freighted with the heart-throbs and regret which thrill through the melody of that pathetic song.
"Ah! Tennyson never had heard this sad, weird poem when he gave the title 'Lord of Human Tears' to Victor Hugo, or our own Longfellow would have won it," said Miss Estill with a sigh.
"Yes; Longfellow is the poet that seems nearest in all our moments of retrospection. I never stand at the crossing of the old Santa Fe and Abilene Trails, on that hill yonder, without his lines recurring,--
'Like an odor of brine from the ocean, Comes the thought of other years;'--
and I must tell you, Miss Estill, that whenever I meet you I feel that same remembrance, vague and evanescent, of a time when you and I were very happy, and were all--at least we were very great friends. But it is so shadowy and indistinct that I can not grasp its meaning. It is like the memory of some half-forgotten dream or the dim recollections of a former life," replied young Warlow, in a low tone, as the pulsing waves of music, the "Blue Danube," throbbed through the vines and lace curtains of the bay-window where they sat.