he worshiped her for it. His sacrifice for her was easier because of
this warm sense of her gratitude, and he kissed the paper he had just
written on for her, because some day it would be touched by her hands.

"If I only dared to say more to comfort her, and beg her to be happy!"
he thought. But the one safe way had been to make his answer to her
calmly impersonal, perhaps even a little cold. For fear he might be
seized with an irresistible desire to add something more, something
from his heart instead of his head, Denin put the letter into an
envelope and sealed it.

Then, however, he stumbled upon a new difficulty which had not occurred
to him before. He was in the act of addressing her as "Lady Denin"
(since she chose to keep his name), when his heart stood still in the
face of a danger he had barely escaped.

How was a stranger like John Sanbourne to know that she was _Lady_
Denin?

If, inadvertently, he had written the name thus, and sent the letter to
the post, even so slight a thing might have made her guess the truth.
Instead of comforting, he might have plunged her into humiliation and
despair.

Barbara had not spoken of herself in the letter as being married. For
all John Sanbourne was supposed to know, she might be a girl, mourning
a brother or a lover. At last he addressed her as "Mrs. or Miss Denin,
Gorston Old Hall." And with several other letters which he forced
himself to write, he enclosed the stamped envelope in a note to
Eversedge Sibley. "Please post these in New York," he begged. "I don't
care to have every one know where I live."

CHAPTER VIII

It was the day he finished re-plastering the house-wall, that the
celebrity was "discovered" by Santa Barbara.

Denin stood half way up a ladder with a trowel in his hand, when a
young man in a Panama hat and a natty suit of gray flannels came
swinging jauntily along the path: altogether, a "natty" looking young
man. He would probably have chosen the adjective himself.

"Good morning!" he confidently addressed the lanky, shirt-sleeved
figure on the ladder. "Do you happen to know if Mr. John Sanbourne is
at home?"

"I am John Sanbourne," said Denin, making no move to descend the
ladder. He wanted to get on with his work, and expected the newcomer's
errand, whatever it might be, would be over and done with in a minute.
He thought that the young man had probably come to sell him an
encyclopedia or a sewing machine, because the only other