red a restaurant, had a small lunch box packed,
and leaving her dressing case, she set off down the valley toward
the mountains. She had need of their strength, their quiet and their
healing. To the one particular spot where she had found comfort in Lilac
Valley her feet led her. By paths of her own, much overgrown for want
of recent usage, she passed through the cultivated fields, left the
roadway, and began to climb. When she reached the stream flowing down
the rugged hillside, she stopped to rest for a while, and her mind was
in a tumult. In one minute she was seeing the bitterly disappointed face
of a lonely, sensitive man whose first wound had been reopened by the
making of another possibly quite as deep; and at the next her heart was
throbbing because Linda had succeeded in transferring the living Peter
to paper.

The time had come when Marian felt that she would know the personality
embodied in the letters she had been receiving; and in the past few
days her mind had been fixing tenaciously upon Peter Morrison. And the
feeling concerning which she had written Linda had taken possession of
her. Wealth did not matter; position did not matter. Losing the love of
a good man did not matter But the mind and the heart and the personality
behind the letters she had been receiving did matter. She thought long
and seriously When at last she arose she had arrived at the conclusion
that she had done the right thing, no matter whether the wonderful
letters she had received went on and offered her love or not, no matter
about anything. She must merely live and do the best she could, until
the writer of those letters chose to disclose himself and say what
purpose he had in mind when he wrote them.

So Marian followed her own path beside the creek until she neared its
head, which was a big, gushing icy spring at the foot of the mountain
keeping watch over the small plateau that in her heart she had thought
of as hers for years. As she neared the location strange sounds began to
reach her, voices of men, clanging of hammers, the rip of saws. A look
of deep consternation overspread her face. She listened an instant and
then began to run. When she broke through the rank foliage flourishing
from the waters of the spring and looked out on the plateau what she saw
was Peter Morrison's house in the process of being floored and shingled.
For a minute Marian was physically ill. Her heart hurt until her hand
crept to her side in an effor