at your most generous wish and prophecy has been more than
fulfilled.

Yours, very gratefully,

EDMUND BRAY.

Within the hour the messenger returned with the still briefer reply:--

"Miss Neworth has been fully aware of that preoccupation with his good
fortune which prevented Mr. Bray from an earlier acknowledgment of her
foolish note."

Cold as this response was, Bray's heart leaped. She HAD lingered on the
summit, and HAD expected a reply. He seized his hat, and, jumping into
the first cab at the hotel door, drove rapidly back to the house. He
had but one idea, to see her at any cost, but one concern, to avoid a
meeting with her father first, or a denial at her very door.

He dismissed the cab at the street corner and began to reconnoitre the
house. It had a large garden in the rear, reclaimed from the adjacent
"scrub oak" infested sand hill, and protected by a high wall. If he
could scale that wall, he could command the premises. It was a bright
morning; she might be tempted into the garden. A taller scrub oak grew
near the wall; to the mountain-bred Bray it was an easy matter to swing
himself from it to the wall, and he did. But his momentum was so great
that he touched the wall only to be obliged to leap down into the garden
to save himself from falling there. He heard a little cry, felt his feet
strike some tin utensil, and rolled on the ground beside Eugenia and her
overturned watering-pot.

They both struggled to their feet with an astonishment that turned to
laughter in their eyes and the same thought in the minds of each.

"But we are not on the mountains now, Mr. Bray," said Eugenia, taking
her handkerchief at last from her sobering face and straightening
eyebrows.

"But we are quits," said Bray. "And you now know my real name. I only
came here to tell you why I could not answer your letter the same day. I
never got it--I mean," he added hurriedly, "another man got it first."

She threw up her head, and her face grew pale. "ANOTHER man got it," she
repeated, "and YOU let another man"--

"No, no," interrupted Bray imploringly. "You don't understand. One of my
partners went to the spring that afternoon, and found it; but he neither
knows who sent it, nor for whom it was intended." He hastily recounted
Parkhurst's story, his mysterious belief, and his interpretation of
the note. The color came back to her face and the smile to her lips and
eyes. "I had gone twice to the spring after I saw you, but