t's a pleasant old place," he repeated, as he
went out into the hot, still sunshine beyond. He filled his game-bag,
and sat down to rest a while before returning. Then for the first time
he remembered the letter, and drew it forth. This was the letter Carl
meant; Carl asked him to get it after he was dead; he must have
intended, then, that he, Mark, should read it. He opened it, and looked
at the small, slanting handwriting without recognizing it. Then from the
inside a photograph fell out, and he took it up; it was Leeza. On the
margin was written, "For Mark."

She had written; but, womanlike, not, as Carl expected, to Mark.
Instead, she had written to Carl, and commissioned _him_ to tell
Mark--what? Oh, a long story, such as girls tell, but with the point
that, after all, she "liked" (liked?) Mark best. Carl's letter had been
blunt, worded with unflattering frankness. Leeza was tired of her own
coquetries, lonely, and poor; she wrote her foolish little apologizing,
confessing letter with tears in her blue eyes--those blue eyes that
sober, reticent Mark Deal could not forget.

Carl had gone to San Miguel, then, to mail a letter--a letter which had
brought this answer! Mark, with his face in his hands, thanked God that
he had not spoken one harsh word to the boy for what had seemed
obstinate disobedience, but had tended him gently to the last.

Then he rose, stretched his arms, drew a long breath, and looked around.
Everything seemed altered. The sky was brassy, the air an oven. He
remembered the uplands where the oats grew, near Exton; and his white
sand-furrows seemed a ghastly mockery of fields. He went homeward and
drew water from his well to quench his burning thirst; it was tepid, and
he threw it away, recalling as he did so the spring under the cool,
brown rocks where he drank when a boy. A sudden repugnance came over him
when his eyes fell on the wild oranges lying on the ground, over-ripe
with rich, pulpy decay; he spurned them aside with his foot, and thought
of the firm apples in the old orchard, a fruit cool and reticent, a
little hard, too, not giving itself to the first comer. Then there came
over him the hue of Northern forests in spring, the late, reluctant
spring of Exton; and the changeless olive-green of the pine barrens grew
hideous in his eyes. But, most of all, there seized him a horror of the
swamp--a horror of its hot steaming air, and its intoxicating perfume,
which reached him faintly even wh