"His beard has gone, and his hair has been cut Eastern fashion, and his mustache turned up at the ends, and he dresses well,--Mary says so,--and that the contrast is startling. Oh, Phil! What if he should--" "Should what? Fall in love with your paragon of women? Well, I suppose men are never too old to make fools of themselves, and Caleb is only forty, but I beg that you'll at once remind Miss Truett that Caleb is too good a man to be hurt at heart for a woman's amusement. Why are you looking at nothing in that vague manner?" "I'm trying to imagine Caleb's new appearance." "Spare yourself the effort. I'll telegraph him for a photograph." "But I want to know--at once, to see whether he's really impressed Mary more seriously than she admits." "Oh, you women! You can start a possible romance on less basis than would serve for a dream. Do go backward in that letter, to the lady's brother, if only to suppress your imagination." "I suppose I must," sighed Grace, "for I've reached the end. The brother, it seems, can secure a railroad pass to visit this country, if there is any possible business opening for him here." "I wish there were, I'm sure, for I don't know of a place more in need of services such as a landscape architect could render, but you know that he couldn't earn a dollar." "But it seems that he knows something of road-making and grading." "Which also are accomplishments that might be put to good use here, if there were any one to pay for the work." "I have it!" Grace said. "The very thing! Don't you dare laugh at me until I tell it all. You know--or I do--that Doctor Taggess thinks Claybanks would be far less malarious if the swamp lands could be drained. He says the malarious exhalation, whatever it is, seems to be heavier than the air, and is therefore comparatively local in its effects, for he has known certain towns and other small localities to be entirely free from it, though the surrounding country was full of it. Now, if some surveyor and engineer--say Mary Truett's brother--could find out how to drain our Claybanks swamps, it might make this a healthy town. Is that a very silly notion?" "Silly? Not a bit of it! But, my dear girl, do you know what such an enterprise would cost?" "No, but I do know what I suffered on the day of my awful malarial attack and that I shall never forget the spectacle of a poor, dear, little, helpless, innocent baby shaking with a chill!" "Poor girl! Poor baby! But don't you suppose that our swamp lands have been studied for years by the men most interested in them--the farmers and other owners?--studied and worked at?"