was only after the return from his second cruise that Code paid
attention to Nellie Tanner. Something in him that respected her
trouble and Elsa's confession at the same time had kept his lips
sealed during that short stay at home. But one Sunday after the second
trip they climbed to the crest of the mountain back of the closed
Mallaby House, and Code told her what had been in his heart all these
years.

For a while she said nothing. The sun was setting over the distant
Maine coast and the clouds all round the horizon were wonderful masses
of short-lived rainbow texture. The sea was the pink and greenish blue
of floating oil.

"You get me a trifle shop-worn," she said at last, laughing
uncertainly.

"Then I get you?" He had turned toward her with a flash of boyish
eagerness. One look at her radiant face and shining eyes found the
answer.

"Shop-worn?" he said after a while. "Well, so am I, a trifle, but not
in the way you mean. If having the down knocked off one and seeing
things truer and better for it is being shop-worn, then thank God for
the wearing.

"It has been a roundabout way for us, little girl, but at last our
paths have met, and from now on, God willing, they shall go together.
Come, I want to show you something."

They walked through the woods until they found the place where the
surveyors had laid out the foundation plan for the little house. There
they found an interested couple gravely discussing a near-by
excavation with the aid of a blue-print.

Presently the couple turned around, and the lovers clutched each other
in amazement.

"Bless me," gasped Code, "if it isn't ma and Pete Ellinwood!"

THE END

JOHN FOX, JR'S.

STORIES OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS

May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list.

THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE.

Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.

The "_lonesome pine_" from which the story takes its name was a tall tree
that stood in solitary splendor on a mountain top. The fame of the pine
lured a young engineer through Kentucky to catch the trail, and when he
finally climbed to its shelter he found not only the pine but the
_foot-prints of a girl_. And the girl proved to be lovely, piquant, and
the trail of these girlish foot-prints led the young engineer a madder
chase than "the trail of the lonesome pine."

THE LITTLE SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COME

Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.

This is a story of Kentucky, in a settlement known as "Kingdom