CHAPTER XVI.

BACK TO DIXIE

THERE was another mark on the kitchen calendar now; not a red star, betokening some happy event to come, but a deep black border, drawn all around the date on which Lloyd's visit was to end. The heavy black lines marked the time as only a few days distant.

It was Saturday again, a week after the excursion to the Indian school. Joyce had gone down to the ranch, for Mr. Armond to criticize the drawings which she had made since the last lesson, and Lloyd, on the seat under the willows, was waiting for Phil. He was to come at four, and ride over to one of the neighbouring orange groves with her.

She had a book in her hand, but she was not reading. She was listening to the water gurgle through the little water-gate into the lateral, and thinking of all that had happened during her visit, especially since the night she was lost on the desert, and Phil had found her.

Monday he had spent the entire day at the Wigwam, and, since Joyce had forbidden him to come near the spot where the washing was in progress, he and Lloyd had brought a jar of paste and the little wicker table down to this very seat under the willows, and had mounted all her photographs in the book she had bought for the purpose. There were over a hundred, beginning with a view of the Wigwam and ending with the four laughing faces around the table on the balcony of Coffee Al's restaurant. There was Lloyd on her pony, coming back from the duck hunt, and again in the act of dropping her cherry tart. There was Mary in the hammock watching the bees, Jack in his irrigating boots, and Holland on a burro. There were a dozen different pictures of Joyce, and family groups, and picnic groups, in which was represented every acquaintance Lloyd had made in Arizona. Turning the pages was like living over the pleasant days again, for they brought the scenes vividly before her.

When the last picture was mounted, Phil proposed that they write an appropriate quotation under each one. So they spent another hour over that, Phil suggesting most of them, and at Lloyd's request writing the inscriptions himself in his strong, dashing hand. Some of his apt phrases and clever parodies seemed really brilliant to Lloyd, and they had laughed and joked over them in a way that had ripened their friendship as weeks of ordinary intercourse would not have done.

"Do you know," he said, when the last inscription was written, "I've kept count, and I'm in twenty-five of these pictures. You won't have much chance to forget me, will you? I haven't put my collection in a book, but I have a better reminder of this last month than all these put together."

Opening the little locket that hung from his watch-fob, he held it toward her, just long enough for her to catch a glimpse of her own face within it. Then, closing the locket with a snap, he put the fob back in its place. It was a picture he had taken of her one day as she sat on this same seat under the willows, watching Aunt Emily braid an Indian basket. He had cut out a tiny circle containing her head, from the rest of the group, just the size to fit in the locket.

Lloyd, leaning forward unsuspectingly to look at it, was so surprised at seeing her own picture that a deep blush stole slowly over her face, and she drew back in confusion, not knowing what to say. If he had asked her permission to put her picture in his locket, she would have refused as decidedly as she had refused Malcolm the tip of a curl to carry in his watch.

But Phil had not asked for anything; had not said a word to which she could reply as she had replied to Malcolm. He had showed her the locket in the same matter-of-course way that Rob had showed her the four-leafed clover which he carried. Yet deep down in her heart she knew that there was a difference. She knew that her father would not like Phil to have her picture in his locket, but she didn't know how to tell him so.

It was only an instant that she sat in shy, embarrassed silence, with her heart in a flutter, and her eyes fastened on the book of photographs which she was fingering nervously. Then Jack came out with a pitcher of lemonade, and the opportunity to speak passed. She hadn't the courage to bring up the subject afterward.

"Phil might think that I think that it means moah than it does," she told herself. "He weahs the pictuah just as he would Elsie's, and if I tell him that I don't want him to, he'll think that I think that he cares for me the way that Malcolm does. I don't suppose that it really makes any difference whethah he has it in his locket or not."

He did not mention it again, but it did make a difference. The consciousness of it embarrassed her whenever she met his eyes. She wondered if Joyce noticed.

Tuesday he came again, and read aloud all morning while they ironed. Wednesday he spent the day without bringing anything as an excuse. Thursday he rode with them over to the Indian reservation. Her pony had been brought back to her the day after it ran away. When he left them at the Wigwam that evening he said that he would not be back the next day as he had to go to Phoenix, but that he would be up Saturday afternoon to ride with Lloyd to the orange grove while Joyce took her drawing-lesson.

It was of all this that Lloyd was thinking now, as she sat under the willows. And she was thinking, too, of the tale Mrs. Walton told her of The Three Weavers; the tale that had been the cause of the Shadow Club turning itself into the Order of Hildegarde.

Mrs. Walton had spoken truly when she said that "Little girls begin very early sometimes to dream about that far-away land of Romance." Lloyd's dreams might not have begun so soon, perhaps, had it not been for the meetings of the Shadow Club at boarding-school, when Ida Shane fired their imaginations with the stories of "Daisy Dale" and "The Heiress of Dorn," and made Lloyd the bearer of her letters to her "Edwardo." The unhappy ending of Ida's romance had been a grave warning to Lloyd, and the story of Hildegarde in the Three Weavers was often in her thoughts. Part of it floated through her memory now, as she realized, with a start, how large a place Phil had occupied in her thoughts the last week.

"Hildegarde worked on, true to her promise, but there came a time when a face shone across her mirror, so noble and fair that she started back in a flutter. 'Oh, surely, 'tis he!' she whispered to her father. 'His eyes are so blue they fill all my dreams!' But old Hildgardmar answered her, 'Does he measure up to the standard set by the sterling yardstick for a prince to be?'"

"That is just what Papa Jack would ask," mused Lloyd. "And he'd say that little girls outgrow their ideals as they do their dresses, and that if I'm not careful that I'll make the same mistake that Hertha and Huberta