line which she traced was a hasty dash back across the map to
Lone-Rock. She always tried to dash the thought of it out of mind just
as quickly. The heart-breaking agony of it, when she was flying home to
find her brother a hopeless cripple, was too terrible to recall even
now, after a long time, when he was sitting beside her, strong and well.

Then her finger trailed down across the map, retracing their last
journey the year before to San Antonio and the hill country above it. In
many ways it had been a hard year, but, remembering its happy outcome,
she said to herself that it should be marked by triple lines of red.
They had gone down to the place, strangers in a strange land, they were
coming away with some of the warmest friendships of their lives binding
them fast to it. Down there Jack had had his wonderful recovery, which
was above and beyond all that their wildest hopes had pictured. And,
too, it was the last place where she would have expected to meet Phil
Tremont again. Yet he had appeared suddenly one day as if it were the
most natural thing in the world to be standing there by the huisache
tree to help her over the fence of the blue-bonnet pasture.

"By what has been, learn what will be," she repeated, and then idly
pricked that motto into the edge of the folder with a pin, as she went
on recalling various incidents. Judging by her past she had every reason
to believe that the future might be full of happy surprises; so, as she
studied the map now, it was to wonder which way the new trails would
lead her.

"Any way at all!" she thought fervently. "I don't care which direction
they take, if they'll only come around to the Happy Valley. I'm bound to
get there at any cost."

Presently she folded up the map and sat gazing dreamily out of the
window. An old song that was often on her lips came to her mind, but,
this time, she parodied it to suit her hopes:

"For if I go not by the road, and go not by the hill,
And go not by the far sea way, yet go I surely will!
Close all the roads of all the world--Love's road is open still."

CHAPTER II

BACK AT LONE-ROCK

The home-coming was keenly pleasant. Mary, who had been going over the
house helping to throw open all the doors and windows, paused in the
cheerful living-room. The September sun shone across the worn carpet and
the familiar furniture which had served them even in the days of the
little brown house.

"I didn't k