ary as yet, and
it will be quite safe.

"Your friend,
"MARY YARDWELL."

As soon as he decently could Harold went to his room and opened the
important letter. In it the reticent-girl had uttered herself with
unusual freedom. It was a long letter, and its writer must have gone to
its composition at once after the door had closed upon her visitors. It
began abruptly, too:

"DEAR FRIEND: My heart aches for you. From the time I first
saw you in the jail I have carried your face in my mind. I
can't quite analyze my feeling for you now. You are so
different from the boy I knew. I think I am a little afraid
of you, you scare me a little. You are of another world, a
strange world of which I would like to hear. I have a woman's
curiosity, I can't let you go away until you tell me all your
story. I would like to say something on my own side
also. Can't you come and see me once more? My father is going
to be away at his farm all day to-morrow, can't you come with
Mr. Burns and take dinner with me and tell me all about
yourself--your life is so strange.

"There will be no one there (I mean at dinner) but Mr. Burns
and you, and we can talk freely. Does being 'under
indictment' mean that you are in danger of arrest? I want to
understand all about that. You can't know how strange and
exciting all these things are to me. My life is so humdrum
here. You come into it like a great mountain wind. You take
my words away as well as my breath. I am not like most women,
words are not easy to me even when I write, though I write
better than I talk--I think.

"Mr. King asked me to be his wife some months ago, and I
promised to do so, but that is no reason why we should not be
good friends. You have been too much in my life to go out of
it altogether, though I had given up seeing you again, and
then we always think of our friends as we last saw them, we
can't imagine their development. Don't you find this so? You
said you found me changed.

"I have little to tell you about myself. I graduated and then
I spent one winter in Chicago to continue my music studies. I
am teaching here summers to get pin money. It is so quiet
here one grows to think all the world very far away, and the
wild things among which you have lived and