yd is engaged, and not to Phil!_ She has been
engaged since last June to Rob Moore. It is not to be announced formally
until Christmas, and they are not to be married for a long time, but
Eugenia knows, and Joyce, and her very most intimate friends. She wanted
me to know, and to hear it from herself, because she felt that no one
could wish her joy more sincerely than her '_little chum_.' I am so glad
she really called me that, after all my months of make believe.

"But it was the surprise of my life to find that Rob is The Prince and
not Phil. Poor Phil! I am sure he was disappointed, and somehow I keep
thinking of that more than of Lloyd's happiness. I don't see how she
_could_ prefer anybody else to the Best Man."

Here she paused, and began fingering the unwritten leaves of the diary,
wondering if the time would ever come when they would hold the record of
other engagements. Nearly a third of the pages were still blank. How
many nice things she could think of that she would like to be able to
write thereon. Maybe they would hold the date of a visit to Oaklea some
day, to _Mrs. Rob Moore_. How odd that sounded. Or what was more
probable, since he had already mentioned it in his letters to Jack, a
visit from Phil, if he went back to California with his father and Elsie
on their return.

And maybe, it might hold the news of Joyce's engagement, some day, or
Betty's, and maybe--some far, far-off day, it might hold her own! That
seemed a very unlikely thing just now. Princes were an unknown quantity
in Lone-Rock. And yet--she looked dreamily away across the hills--there
were the words of that song:

"And if he come not by the road, and come not by the hill,
And come not by the far seaway, yet come he surely will.
Close all the roads of all the world, love's road is open still."

Seizing her pen, she wrote just below her last entry, "It is five months
since that dismal day on the train, when I closed the record in this
book, as I thought, forever, and wrote after the last of my good times,
_The End_. But it wasn't that at all, and now, no matter how dark the
outlook may be after this, I shall _never_ believe that I have reached
the end to happiness."

THE END.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware
by Annie Fellows Johnston

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