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She raised her little head high and gazed anxiously away through the thickening gloom. A last flock of geese was flying south and the familiar honking which before this had only aroused her curiosity, now filled her with foreboding and loneliness. Loneliness was a state of mind heretofore unknown to her; but now it brooded over the plains like a nebulous dragon dropped from some other world, waiting for an opportunity to devour her.

She walked off slowly and listlessly to where she had been asleep, intending to while away the time by grazing until her mother should wake up; but she could not eat. It was not many minutes before she was walking right back again, calling more loudly than ever. Getting no response, she stood still, and looked at the body she loved, trying very hard to understand.

All the while the day waned. The sky grew blacker. The wind blew stronger and in the air the something that had been threatening all day seemed to have come nearer. Grass blades and rosebushes nodded mournfully over all the lonely earth, and little Queen imagined, as she turned round and round to look into every gloomy direction, that the prairie had become peopled with dangerous forms who always fled from sight just as she turned her eyes toward them.