with a smile:

"Hereafter it will be all right between us."

And it was--apparently.

As they walked slowly homeward York and Jerry said little. The girl's
mind was busy with thoughts of her new work--the only work she had ever
attempted in her life; and York's thoughts were busy with--Jerry.

That night York sat alone on the porch of "Castle Cluny" until far
toward morning, beginning at last to fight out with himself the great
battle of his life. The big, kindly, practical man of affairs,
arrow-proof, bullet-proof, bomb-proof to all the munitions of Cupid,
courted and flattered and admired and looked up to by a whole community,
seemed hopelessly enmeshed now in the ripples of golden-brown hair, held
fast by the beautiful dark-blue eyes of a young lady whose strength to
withstand what lay before her he very much doubted.

"If I speak to her now, she'll run away from us and leave Laura lonely.
She can't go to the hotel, because I know Ponk has tried and failed. I'm
one degree behind him in that. Where would she go? And how would the Big
Dipper act? I've no faith in her keeping still if Jerry did use some
magic on her to-night. Nobody will ever Rumpelstilskin her out of
herself. I'll be a man, and wait and befriend my little girl whenever I
can, although I'm forced every day to see how she is growing to take
care of herself. When nothing else can decide events, time is sure to
settle them."

All this happened at the beginning of the three years whose ending came
in a June-time on the Kansas plains. Summer and winter, many a Sabbath
afternoon saw the hotel-keeper and the pretty mathematics-teacher
strolling out to the cemetery "to call on mother." The quaint, firm
faith of the pompous little man that "mother knew" had no place in Jerry
Swaim's code and creed. But she never treated his belief lightly, and
its homely sincerity at length began to bear fruit.

Not without its lasting effect, too, was the silent influence of Laura
Macpherson upon her guest. The bright, happy life in spite of a hopeless
lameness, the cheerful giving up of what that lameness denied the
having, all unconsciously wrought its beauty into the new Jerry whom the
"Eden" of an earlier day had never known. Nobody remembered when the
guest and friend of the Macphersons began to be a factor in the New Eden
church life, but everybody knew at the close of the third year that the
churches couldn't do without her. And neither the Baptist minister,
hold