ant to
her. Instantly there sprang up in her heart the knowledge that all she
had left behind was as nothing to the love and sympathy that was to
enfold her henceforth.

CHAPTER II

TOWARDS THE CANAAN OF HER DESIRE

In Phil Tremont's office desk, in an inner drawer reserved for private
papers, lay a package of letters fastened together by a broad rubber
band. "From the Little Vicar," it was labelled, and Mary's astonishment
would have been great, could she have known that every letter she had
ever written him was thus preserved. He had kept the first ones, written
in a childish, painstaking hand, because they chronicled the doings of
the family at Ware's Wigwam in such an amusing and characteristic way.
The letters after that time had been few and far between until her final
return to Lone-Rock, but each one had been kept for some different
reason. It had contained a particularly laughable description of some of
her Warwick Hall escapades, or some original view of life and the world
in general which made it worth preserving.

Then when Mrs. Ware's letters ceased, and at Phil's urgent request Mary
took up her mother's custom of writing regularly to him, he kept them
because they revealed so much of herself. So brave, so womanly, so
strong she had grown, bearing her great sorrow as the Jester did his
hidden sword, to prove that "undaunted courage was the jewel of her
soul." All during the lonely summer after her mother's death he expected
to go to see her in the fall, but the work which held him in Mexico was
not finished, and too much depended upon its successful completion for
him to ask for leave of absence.

Then, just as he was about to start back to the States, his chief was
taken ill, and asked him to stay and fill his place in another
engineering enterprise which he had made a contract for. It was an
opportunity too big for Phil to thrust aside, even if his sense of
obligation had not been so great to the man who had helped make him what
he was. So he consented to stay on another year. The place to which he
was sent, where the great new dam was to be constructed, was further in
the interior. His papers, brought over on mule back, were a week old
when they reached him, and Mary's letters attained an importance they
might not have had otherwise, had he been in a less lonely region.

It was with great satisfaction that he heard of Jack's marriage. He
felt that Mary would be more satisfied to stay on in