me and stop this
nonsense. Dear! How you have grown, you tiny thing. You must be nearly
to my elbows by this."

"Elbows! I'm well on towards five feet, I'll let you know. But you are
superb, Joyce--'divinely tall and most divinely fair'; isn't that it?
Come, stoop to me."

They kissed heartily, the dark little creature standing on tiptoe, while
Joyce bent her head low, then Dodo claimed attention from "Cammy," and
amid bursts of laughter and sometimes a rush of sudden tears, the talk
flowed on, as it can only flow when dearest friends meet after long
separation, with no estrangement and no doubts to dim the charms of
renewed intercourse.

CHAPTER III.

JOYCE'S INTERESTS.

Joyce had not exaggerated when she spoke of the settlement about the
Works as a desolate, unpicturesque, uninviting spot, and Camille had
skirted the truth, at least, when she referred to the inherited acres as
"marsh lands." Had she named them a desert instead, though, she would
have been nearer correct, for is not a desert a "great sandy plain?" So
was the site of the great factories known as the Early Glass Works. They
seemed to have been set down with no thought but to construct--a shelter
for costly machinery; as to those who worked it, let them manage anyhow.
The buildings were massive and expensive where used to protect senseless
iron and steel; low, squalid, and flung together in the cheapest way
where used to house sentient human beings.

In a certain spasm of reformation they had been purchased by James J.
Early after a venture in his gambling schemes so surpassingly
"lucky"--to quote himself--that he was almost shamed into decency by its
magnitude. He even felt a thrill of compunction--a very brief
thrill--for the manner in which two-score people, who had trusted him,
were left in the trough of ruin while he rode high on the wave of
success. Almost trembling between triumph and contrition, he had been
seized with the virtuous resolve to quit speculation for honest
industry, and his investment in these glass-works was the result.
Through his wildest plunging he had been shrewd enough never to risk his
all in one venture--in fact, he never took any great risks for himself,
except so far as his immortal soul was concerned--consequently when
death overtook him and he, perforce, laid down the only thing he valued,
his fortune, it had reached proportions of which figures could give but
little idea. His daughter Joyce, sole heir-at