A trim little maid opened the door and led the way into a long library where in the fireplace a pine backlog, crisscrossed by sturdy forelogs of birch and maple, awaited the touch of a match. It was given, and the room was filled with a flaring light that made the soft lamplight seem pale and feeble. "This is a genuine Brumble fire," he exclaimed, as they sat down before the ruddy glow. "It carries me back to farm life." "How many phases of life you have seen," mused Carey. "Country, college, city, tropical, and now this political life. Which one have you really enjoyed the most?" "My life in the Land of Dreams--that beautiful Isle of Everywhere," he replied. Her eyes grew radiant with understanding. "You are not so very much changed since your days of dreaming," she said, smiling. "To be sure, you have lost your freckles and you don't kick at the ground when you walk, and--" "And," he reminded, as she paused. "You are no longer twice my age." "Did Janey tell you?" "Yes; the last summer I was at Maplewood--the summer you were graduated. You say you don't dream any more, but it wasn't so very long ago that you did, else how could you have written that wonderful book?" "Then you read it?" he asked eagerly. "Of course I read it." "All of it?" "Could any one begin it and not finish it? I've read some parts of it many times." "Did you," he asked slowly, holding her eyes in spite of her desire to lower them, "read the dedication?" And by their subtle confession he knew that this was one of the parts she had read "many times." "Yes," she replied, trying to speak lightly, but breathing quickly, "and I wondered who T. L. P. might be." "And so you didn't know," in slow, disappointed tones, "that they stood for the name I gave you when I first met you--the name by which I always think of you? It was with your perfect understanding of my old fancies in mind that I wrote the book. And so I dedicated it to you, thinking if you read it you would know even without the inscription. Some one suggested--" "It was Fletcher," she began. "Oh, you know Wilder?" "Yes, I've known him always. He has told me of your days in South America together and how he told you to dedicate it. And he wondered who T. L. P. might be." "And you never guessed?" Her face, bent over the firelight, looked small and white; her beautiful eyes were fixed and grave. Then suddenly she lifted them to his with the artlessness of a child. "I did know," she confessed. "At least, I hoped--I claimed it as my book, anyway, but I thought your memory of those summers at the farm might not have been as keen as mine." "It is keen," he replied. "I have always thought of you as a little princess who only lived in my dreams, but, hereafter, you are not only in my past dreams, but I hope, in my future." "When we come back--" "Will you be gone long?" he asked wistfully. "Is your father--" "Father can't go, but he may join us."