aska. I hope you are well and happy. You always were a
sunshiny old chap. Here's hoping.

"Your old friend,
"DENTON."

"Is it not a very gran' letter?" asked old Jean with anxious pride. "My
frien' Denton have study in college, too."

"Indeed it is, Jean," agreed Anne warmly.

"Your friend seems to be the right sort of comrade, even if he is a bad
correspondent," remarked David Nesbit.

"Something like me," murmured Hippy gently.

No one appeared to notice this modest assertion.

"Sounds like a page from a best seller, doesn't it, Grace?" asked Tom
laughingly.

Grace did not answer. She was gazing at the signature of the letter with
perplexed eyes. She was wondering why the name Denton seemed so
familiar. Remembrance came suddenly--Ruth, of course. With that
recollection came a sudden startling train of thought. Ruth's father had
gone west, had been heard from in Nevada, then disappeared. Jean's
friend had lost his wife and child on a westbound train. Here, however,
Grace's supposition proved weak. Both wife and child had been burned to
death in the railroad wreck. Still, mistakes in identification were
frequently made on such painful occasions. Grace went back to her first
supposition. "It is the only shred of a clew that I have run across
yet," she reflected. "I am going to hang to it and see where it leads.
And to think that perhaps old Jean once knew Ruth's father. It's
unbelievable."

"We must start in ten minutes." David's crisp, business-like tones
brought her to a realization of her immediate surroundings.

"Ten minutes is long enough for me to say what is on my mind," Grace
said eagerly. Then she began to tell of Ruth, her poverty, and her great
wish to know whether her father were dead or alive. Knowing Grace as
they did, her friends guessed that she had something of real importance
to impart. When she came to the part about Ruth's father going west
after promising to send for his little family, a light began to dawn
upon them, and Jessica exclaimed: "Why, they must have been killed while
on their way to join him!"

"It is so. Mamselle speak the truth!" almost shouted Jean. "It was then
they die. He have tol' me so many times."

"Then the man who saved Jean must have been Ruth's father!" exclaimed
Miriam, "and a dreadful mistake was made in telling him his child was
dead, too. The packet fastened by a cord about Ruth's neck ought easily
to have proved her identity. Perhaps the packet wa