in within my reach! All the
mystery, the poignant happiness were mine again. Do not hold me in
contempt because I show you my heart. You saw my misery. Why should
I grudge you a glimpse of my happiness? She saw me when I touched her
hand, not before, so wrapped was she. But she did not seem surprised.
Only in her splendid eyes there came a large content. She pointed to the
dancing little white fall. 'I thought something wonderful was going to
happen,' she whispered, 'for it has been laughing so.'

"I shall not return to New York. I am going to stay here with my
mountain woman, and I think perhaps I shall find out what life means
here sooner than I would back there with you. I shall learn to see large
things large and small things small. Judith says to tell you and Miss
Grant that the four voices are calling for you every day in the valley.

"Yours in fullest friendship,

"LEROY BRAINARD."

Jim Lancy's Waterloo

"WE must get married before time to put in crops," he wrote. "We must
make a success of the farm the first year, for luck. Could you manage
to be ready to come out West by the last of February? After March opens
there will be no let-up, and I do not see how I could get away. Make it
February, Annie dear. A few weeks more or less can make no difference to
you, but they make a good deal of difference to me."

The woman to whom this was written read it with something like anger. "I
don't believe he's so impatient for me!" she said to herself. "What he
wants is to get the crops in on time." But she changed the date of their
wedding, and made it February.

Their wedding journey was only from the Illinois village where she lived
to their Nebraska farm. They had never been much together, and they had
much to say to each other.

"Farming won't come hard to you," Jim assured her. "All one needs to
farm with is brains."

"What a success you'll make of it!" she cried saucily.

"I wish I had my farm clear," Jim went on; "but that's more than any one
has around me. I'm no worse off than the rest. We've got to pay off the
mortgage, Annie."

"Of course we must. We'll just do without till we get the mortgage
lifted. Hard work will do anything, I guess. And I'm not afraid to work,
Jim, though I've never had much experience."

Jim looked out of the window a long time, at the gentle undulations of
the brown Iowa prairie. His eyes seemed to pierce beneath the sod,
to the swelling buds of the yet invisible grass.