ours respec'fly,

"HAROLD EXCELL.

"Jack will give this to you. Jack is my chum; I'd trust him with my
life. He's all wool."

The girl sat a long time with the letter in her hand. She was but a
child, after all, and the lad's words alarmed and burdened her, for the
meaning of the letter was plain. It was a message of love and
admiration, and though it contained no subtleties, it came from one who
was in jail, and she had been taught to regard people in jail as lost
souls, aliens with whom it was dangerous to hold any intercourse, save
in prayer and Scripture. The handsome boy with the sad face had appealed
to her very deeply, and she bore him in her thoughts a great deal; but
now he came in a new guise--as a lover, bold, outspoken, and persuasive.

"What shall I do? Shall I tell Aunt Lida?" she asked herself, and ended
by kneeling down and praying to Jesus to give the young man a new heart.

In this fashion the courtship went on. No one knew of it but Jack, for
Mary could not bring herself to confide in anyone, not even her mother,
it all seemed too strange and beautiful. It was God's grace working
through her, and her devoutness was not without its human mixture of
girlish pride and exaltation. She worshiped him in her natural moments,
and in her moments of religious fervor she prayed for him with
impersonal anguish as for a lost soul. She did not consider him a
criminal, but she thought him Godless and rebellious toward his
Saviour.

She wrote him quaint, formal little notes, which began abruptly, "My
Friend." They contained much matter which was hortatory, but at times
she became girlish and very charming. Gradually she dropped the tone
which she had caught from revivalists and wrote of her studies and of
the doings of each member of the class, and all other subjects which a
young girl finds valuable material of conversation. She was just
becoming acquainted with Victor Hugo and his resounding, antithetic
phrases, and his humanitarian outcries filled her mind with commotion.
Her heart swelled high with resolution to do something to help the world
in general and Harold in particular.

She was not one in whom passion ruled; the intellectual dominated the
passional in her, and, besides, she was only a child. She was by no
means as mature as Harold, although about the same age. Naturally
reverent, she had been raised in a family where religious observances
never remitted; where grace was always spoken