I don't know what father would do if it wasn't for the company--and John." The daughter held her mother's hand, and after gasping down a sob, promised, and then as the sob kept tilting back in her throat, she cried: "But oh, mother, it's such a big world--so wide, and I am so afraid--so afraid of something--I don't know what--only that I'm afraid." But the mother soothed her daughter, and they talked of other things until she was quiet and drowsy.
But when she went to sleep, she dreamed a strange dream.

The next day she could not untangle it, save that with her for hours as she went about her duties was the odour of lilacs, and the face of her lover, now a young eager face in pain, and then, by the miracle of dreams, grown old, bald at the temples and brow, but fine and strong and clean--like a boy's face.

The face soon left her, but the smell of the lilacs was in her heart for days--they were her lilacs, from the bushes in the garden.

As days and weeks passed, the dream blurred into the gray of her humdrum life and was gone.

And so that day and that night dropped from time into eternity, and who knows of all the millions of stars that swarmed the heavens, what ones held the wandering souls of the simple people of that bleak Western town as they lay on their pillows and dreamed.