all covered with sand, barren and worthless as a desert?
I thought I might have been mistaken."

The hope died out of Jerry's face with the query.

"I wish I could have saved you this surprise," York said, earnestly.
"Come home with me now. 'Castle Cluny' must be your castle, too, as long
as you can put up with us. And you can take plenty of time to catch your
breath. The earth is a big place, and, while most of it is covered with
water, very little of it is covered entirely with sand."

How kind his tones were! Jerry remembered again that both his sister and
Mr. Ponk had urged her to wait for his coming. But she was not
accustomed to waiting for anybody. A faint but persistent self-blame
gripped her.

"May I stay with you until I find where I really am? Just now I'm all
smothered in bewildering sand-dunes." She smiled up at the tall man
before her with a confiding, appealing earnestness.

Many women smiled upon York Macpherson. Many women confided in him. He
was accustomed to it.

"Laura will consider it a boon, for you must know that she sometimes
gets a trifle lonely in New Eden. We'll call the compact finished." Only
a gracious intuition could have turned the favor so graciously back to
the recipient. But that was York's gift.

In the dining-room at "Castle Cluny" that evening Jerry noticed a silver
cup with a quaintly designed monogram on one side.

"That's an old heirloom," Laura said, as she saw her guest's eyes fixed
on it. "Like everything else in this house, it is coupled up with some
old Macpherson clan tradition, as befitting an old bachelor and old maid
of that ilk."

"We used to have two of them," York said.

"We have yet somewhere," Laura replied. "I hadn't missed one from the
sideboard before. It must be back in the silver-closet, with other old
silver and old memories."

Jerry's day had been full of changes, up and down, from hope to bitter
disappointment, from reality to forgetfulness, from clear conception to
bewildered confusion, her mind had run since she had left the oak-grove
in the forenoon. When she had occasion to remember that silver cup
again, she wondered how she could have passed it over so lightly at this
time.

Although Jerry's problem was very real, and she brought to its solution
neither experience nor discipline, unselfish breadth nor spiritual
trust, there was something in the homey atmosphere of "Castle Cluny"
that seemed to smooth away the long day's wrinkles for her