s thinking, talking, handling and dreaming Real
Estate. Even Percival DeRue Hannington forgot his former hurt and gave
them his business. All were making money--nobody lost. They bought at
a price and sold for more, and the difference in value was debited and
redebited to old Mother Earth. Prosperity vaunted itself in rolling
wheels, cigar smoke, late orgies and rare wines; costly winter trips
to the South; dress, diamonds, foolishness and mining and oil stocks.

Yet through that wildest year of all, Phil and Jim stood firm to the
principles of their business--they bought and sold for their clients,
they loaned on first-class security--they paid as they went and they
banked their commissions. Not once, but a hundred times, could they
have doubled their savings by speculation with a quick turn-over, but
they held fast; and their savings increased faster than their wildest
dreams had ever pictured.

They did more advertising than all the others combined. Their staff of
salesmen and stenographers increased in numbers by rapid jumps. They
had correspondents in every city of importance in the Dominion and the
United States. They had the best stand in town. Anyone coming in by
train could not fail to see it and could not fail to be impressed by
its importance and apparent prosperity, even when they had not been
previously apprised of it.

When early June arrived with its continuous sunshine, when the older
ranches revelled in miles of pink and white apple blossom, when the
small, wild sunflowers spread themselves like a sea of gold over the
hills and valleys bursting in fairy splendour even through the hard
roads and the rock fissures; when the air was redolent with the
hypnotising, cloying sweetness of Nature's perfume from a hundred
million blossoms and charged with the melody of her gaily bedecked
feathered choristers,--Eileen Pederstone came back to her beloved
"Valley of Tempestuous Waters."

In the six short months she had been away, she had written only
occasionally to Phil and then it had been superficially, for she was
not one given to expressing her feelings in pen and ink.

And Phil, in the rush of the new enterprise, had been something of a
desultory correspondent. He had refrained from mentioning business in
any of his letters to her--despite her many questions to him regarding
his endeavours and his progress--intending, thereby, to spring the
greater surprise when she should return. But he might have saved