l.

"I am yours, oh, so gratefully, Barbara Denin.

"P.S. Strange, I didn't notice at first where your cable was dated! I
suppose, like the help you send me, it seemed just to come out of
space! But reading the message again, I broke open the envelope I had
already sealed, to tell you what a throb of the heart I had in seeing
'Santa Barbara.' Can it be that you live at Santa Barbara? I was
christened after that dear old place, because I was born there, or very
near. It's good--it's _wonderful_ to have your words come to me from
_home_."

It was a direct question which she asked. Did he live at Santa Barbara?
But Denin thought best not to answer it. She would forget, maybe, or
would suppose that he had been staying for a short time in California.
Each of his letters to her before, though posted not far from the
Mirador itself, had been enclosed in an envelope to Eversedge Sibley.
In all but one case, other letters to correspondents brought the author
by his book had been sent off in the wrapper with Barbara's. Denin had
taken pains to settle the difficulty of writing to Gorston Old Hall in
this way, in order that neither the name of the woman nor the name of
the place should be remarked by Sibley. He kept this rule with the
letter which followed Barbara's question, but her next broke the plan
in pieces. It crossed one from him, and was written after receiving his
letter about the garden.

"Dear Friend," she named him. "Before I say anything else--and I feel
that there are a thousand things, each pressing forward to be said
first--I must tell you what I have found out. I've learned that you are
living in the house my father built for me. Of course that won't be
important to you. Why should it be so? I have to remind myself over and
over that I am surely just one of many women who have written to you
after reading your book; one of many women you are kind to, out of the
goodness of your heart, and the knowledge that's in it. Can knowledge
be in a _heart?_ Yes, yours is there, I think, even more than in your
brain. I am nothing to you except a poor drowning creature to whom you
have held out a firm hand. But the drowning creature feels that your
living in a place she knew and loved gives her a kind of personal right
in you.

"I read this very morning in a London paper an extract from a New York
one--an article about John Sanbourne. Perhaps you never even knew it
was written? I'm sure you gave no permission to have it