“I didn’t see. I just felt. But something took all my strength out of me suddenly. It was as if something else had clothed itself with my body, only my body didn’t go with it into the garden; it stayed inside. But I knew—I know—all that that Other saw and did.”

“Dearest, you are overwrought and tired. This glorious night has thrown a spell over you, and it has been too much for your tired little head.”

“Margie!” Clare drew herself up, to a sitting posture. “Do you remember Clifford Bentley?” There was so much significance in her tone that the older girl gave her an amazed look as she replied affirmatively.

“Margie, Clifford Bentley was in the garden tonight, spying on you and Ned.”

For a moment Margaret regarded her sister with a kind of terror; then she broke into a soft laugh.

“Oh, come now, Clare. That is too much to ask me to believe. Clifford Bentley has been dead many years, quite too dead, poor boy, to come wandering about our garden.”

“But he was there,” persisted Clare stubbornly. “I tell you, Margie, I felt him there. Please don’t laugh. I am quite serious. Oh, why can’t you understand? Don’t you remember his last words to you?”

Margaret’s face paled under the warm color and she stared wide-eyed at her sister.

“I remember—I was to remain true to him until death joined us; and if I did not—but Clare! How absurd! He a mere boy of fifteen and I an infant of eleven! It is so ridiculous that I can’t help laughing, dearest.”

“It isn’t ridiculous,” protested Clare unhappily but positively. “Because he may be able to cause trouble between you and Ned yet. You know, Margie, you owe your life to Clifford—and if it had not been for you, he would be alive and well.”

“Clare, you are positively idiotic tonight! I must insist that you go to sleep and get rid of your morbid thoughts. Why should you try to spoil my wonderful night, the most beautiful of my life?”

Margaret withdrew pettishly, and a few minutes afterward Clare heard her tucking herself into her own bed, that stood on the other side of their common reading stand. Slowly the lame girl slipped down into her bed again, but her eyes did not close. Still, she was not looking at the picture which she stared at; she was looking back across the years to the time when Margaret was eleven and she was nine—and Clifford Bentley fifteen.