ite dishes for dinner
now, and we'll be served here. It is so pleasant here at this time of
day. I'll go and see to things right away, and we'll have everything
brought out pretty soon."

The owner of all this dainty comfort and restfulness and beauty hurried
away, leaving Eugene Wellington alone in the rose-arbor--alone with
memories of Jerry Swaim, and Uncle Cornie, and life, and love, and hope
and high ambition, and himself--the self that a man must go right with,
if he goes with him at all.

For a long half-hour he sat there in the rose-arbor, the appealing call
of his divine gift filling his artist soul. Then his judgment prevailed.
What he most wanted to have was here, ready to have now--and to hold
later with only a little patient waiting. A few weeks, or months, or
maybe even a year, a run of four swift seasons, and the girl of his
heart's heart would come back into her own, and find him ready for her
coming. That impossible York was not to be considered. Jerry was no
fool, if she was sometimes a bit foolish in her pranks. And he, Eugene
Wellington, had only this day learned of the whole Swaim situation, what
was vastly valuable to know. Meantime, his the task to keep that
precious Jerusha Darby will intact; or, failing in that, came the more
difficult and delicate task of controlling or holding back the pen that
would write another will. And in the end Jerry would love him forever
for what he would save for her--for her--

The memory of what he had learned that day in the business house in the
city came with its testimony that he was shaping his life course well.
Only one little foxy fear dodged about in his mind--the fear that
Jerry--the Jerry he knew, lovable in spite of all her little failings,
beautiful, picturesque, and surprising--that this Jerry, whom he
thought he knew so well, might prove to be an unknowable, unguessable
Jerry whose course would baffle all his plans, his efforts, his heart
longings. It must not be. He would prevent that. But could he?

The coming of dainty viands with exquisite appointments gave nourishment
to his ready appetite, and dulled for a time the thing within him that
sometime must cry out to power or be sleeked down into fat and unfeeling
subjection.

That night two letters were written to New Eden, Kansas, but neither
writer really knew the reader to whom the letter was written, nor
measured life purposes by the same gauge, so setting anew the world-old
stage for a dra