r
waking. Last night I dreamed a strange dream. A little girl, like
one of the pictures in mother's old family photograph album, seemed
to be talking with me,--dressed so quaintly in the dear old fashion
of the days when mother taught the Sycamore Ridge School. She seemed
to be playing with me in some way, and then she said: 'Oh, yes, I am
your telephone; she knows all about it. I tell her every night as we
play together.' And then she was no longer a little girl but a most
beautiful soul and she said with great gentleness: 'In her heart she
loves you--in her heart she loves you. This I know, only she is
proud--proud with the Barclay pride; but in her heart she loves you;
is not that enough?' What a strange dream! I wonder where we are--we
who animate our bodies, when we sleep. What is sleep, but the proof
that death is but a sleep? Oh, Jeanette, Jeanette, come into my soul
as we sleep."

He folded the letter, sealed and addressed it, and dated the envelope,
and put it in his desk--the desk before which Adrian Brownwell had
sat, eating his heart out in futile endeavour to find his place in the
world. Neal Ward had cleaned out one side of the desk, and was using
that for his own. Mrs. Brownwell kept her papers in the other side,
and one key locked them both. As he walked home that night under the
stars, his heart was full of John Barclay's troubles. Neal knew
Barclay well enough to know that the sensitive nature of the man, with
his strongly developed instinctive faculty for getting at the truth,
would be his curse in the turmoil or criticism through which he was
going. So a day or two later Neal was not surprised to find a long
statement in the morning press despatches from Barclay explaining and
defending the methods of the National Provisions Company. He proved
carefully that the notorious Door Strip saved large losses in transit
of the National Provisions Company's grain and grain produce, and
showed that in paying him for the use of these strips the railroad
companies were saving great sums for widowed and orphaned stockholders
of railroads--sums which would be his due for losses in transit if
the strips were not used.

Neal Ward knew what it had cost Barclay in pride to give out that
statement; so the young man printed it on the first page of the
_Banner_ with a kind editorial about Mr. Barclay and his good works.
That night when the paper was off, and young