l
book?"

"Then you read it?" he asked eagerly.

"Of course I read it."

"All of it?"

"Could any one begin it and not finish it? I've read some parts of it
many times."

"Did you," he asked slowly, holding her eyes in spite of her desire
to lower them, "read the dedication?"

And by their subtle confession he knew that this was one of the parts
she had read "many times."

"Yes," she replied, trying to speak lightly, but breathing quickly,
"and I wondered who T. L. P. might be."

"And so you didn't know," in slow, disappointed tones, "that they
stood for the name I gave you when I first met you--the name by which
I always think of you? It was with your perfect understanding of my
old fancies in mind that I wrote the book. And so I dedicated it to
you, thinking if you read it you would know even without the
inscription. Some one suggested--"

"It was Fletcher," she began.

"Oh, you know Wilder?"

"Yes, I've known him always. He has told me of your days in South
America together and how he told you to dedicate it. And he wondered
who T. L. P. might be."

"And you never guessed?"

Her face, bent over the firelight, looked small and white; her
beautiful eyes were fixed and grave. Then suddenly she lifted them to
his with the artlessness of a child.

"I did know," she confessed. "At least, I hoped--I claimed it as my
book, anyway, but I thought your memory of those summers at the farm
might not have been as keen as mine."

"It is keen," he replied. "I have always thought of you as a little
princess who only lived in my dreams, but, hereafter, you are not only
in my past dreams, but I hope, in my future."

"When we come back--"

"Will you be gone long?" he asked wistfully. "Is your father--"

"Father can't go, but he may join us."

After a moment's hesitation she continued, with a slight blush:

"Fletcher is going with us."

"Oh," he said, wondering at his tinge of disappointment.

"Carey," he said wistfully, as he was leaving, "don't you think when a
man dedicates a book to a girl, and they both have a joint claim on a
territory known as the Land of Dreams, that she might call him, as she
did when they were boy and girl, by his first name?"

"Yes, David," she replied with a light little laugh.

The music of the soft "a" rang entrancingly in his ears as he walked
back to the hotel.

CHAPTER V

There was but one important measure to deal with in this session of
the legislature, but