"We are now comfortably established at a boarding house called The Oakland, where they have a queer little dining-room in the basement and the best brown bread you ever put in your mouth. We think we shall settle down here for several weeks. I don't like the idea of going back to Missouri just now for that man would be sure to follow us there. (There are some objections to being named Pennybacker instead of Smith.) I want you to come on immediately." Then followed a page or more of minute directions as to route, bills, etc. "I don't know whether I'll have money enough for all that," said Bess, wrinkling her brow for the first time in her life over the financial problem. "I'll lend it to you if you haven't." "How could I get it back to you?" "That's so!... I guess I'll have to go down with you and collect it myself." "Really?" cried Bess. "Sure! Your grandmother left you in my care and I'm not going to prove recreant to a trust at this late day. Besides, I've got three more weeks to put in somewhere before I can go back to Washington. I guess South Haven will do as well as anywhere else. Don't you want me to go?" "Why, yes. I'd love to have you go. I don't know anything about attending to trunks. I almost know I couldn't manage three." A postscript to this letter said, "I have written at length about that Grand Junction business because I thought Mr. Harcourt would feel interested in hearing about it, and we will not see him again." "And that's where she's going to fool herself," he said with a grin. CHAPTER XXI IN THE TOILS September was almost over. Golden-rod and wild asters fringed the low banks of Black River now, and the cardinal flower bent its stately head to peer suspiciously into the still waters, seeing there a line of red so vivid that it might well pass for a rival. The grapevines in their late luxuriance ran riot, climbing over the underbrush that grew down to the river's brink and pushing out across old trees that had been undermined and lay half buried, a menace to the boatman, but a joy--with all this greenery over them--to a nature-loving eye. Here and there a sumach, blood-red, threw in a needed touch of color, or a maple lifted a flaming branch.