ing tenaciously to salvation by immersion, nor the Presbyterian,
clinging to the doctrine of infant damnation, nor the Methodist,
demanding instantaneous revival-meeting conversion from sin, asked once
that the fair Philadelphian should "become united with the church." That
would necessitate the query, "Which church?" And that would mean a loss
to two and a gain to only one. As far as the blowout sand differed from
"Eden" on the Winnowoc, so far Jerry's religious faith now differed from
the disbelief that followed the death of her father. In Kansas where the
artistic Eugene Wellington had declared his own faith would perish, she
had learned for the first time how to pray.

Letters had long since ceased to come from Aunt Jerry Darby to her
niece, although in a friendly and patiently expectant form Eugene
Wellington wrote beautiful missives breathing more and more of
commercialized ideals and less and less of esthetic dreams, and not at
all of the faith that had marked the spiritual refinement of his young
manhood.

The third spring brought busy, trying days. A sick teacher made it
necessary for the well ones to do double work. The youngest Lenwell boy,
leader of the Senior class, started the annual and eternally trivial and
annoying Senior-class fuss that seems fated to precede most high-school
commencements. For two years it had been Jerry Swaim, whose mathematical
mind seemed gifted with a wonderful generalship, who had managed to
bring the class to harmony with an ease never known in the New Eden High
School before. This year Clare Lenwell was perfectly irreconcilable, and
Jerry, overworked, as willing teachers always are, was too busy to bring
the belligerents to time before the bitterness of a town-split was upon
the community. When she did come to the rescue of the superintendent,
his own inefficiency to cope with the case became so evident that he at
once turned against the young woman who "tried to run things," as he
characterized her to the school board.

That caused an explosion of heavy artillery from the "Commercial Hotel
and Garage," which made one member of the board, an uncle of young
Lenwell, to rise in arms, and thus and so the fires of dissension
crisscrossed the town, threatening to fulmine over the whole Sage Brush
Valley. To make the matter more difficult, the town trouble-maker,
Stellar Bahrr, for once seemed to have been innocently drawn into the
thing, and everybody knew it was better to have St