Mary Ware's Promised LandJohnston, Annie F. (Annie Fellows)
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Mary Ware's Promised Land
Johnston, Annie F. (Annie Fellows)
Young women -- Juvenile fiction
The next line followed the course of the red ink trail in her old
primary geography, for that was the trail she had followed back to the
gilt paper star which stood for Lloydsboro Valley. The land which she
had learned to love through song and story had been the dearest of all
to her ever since, through the associations of that happy summer. There
were several other trips to retrace as she sat with the map spread out
before her. The long one she took to Warwick Hall, where surely no one
ever had fuller, happier school-days. She did not stop to recall them
now, thinking with satisfaction that they were all recorded in her "Good
Times Book," and that if ever "days of dole, those hoarfrost seasons of
the soul," came into her life, every cell of that memory hive would be
stored with the honey of their good cheer. So also were her Christmas
and Easter vacations recorded, when she and Betty visited Joyce in her
studio apartment in New York.
The next line which she traced was a hasty dash back across the map to
Lone-Rock. She always tried to dash the thought of it out of mind just
as quickly. The heart-breaking agony of it, when she was flying home to
find her brother a hopeless cripple, was too terrible to recall even
now, after a long time, when he was sitting beside her, strong and well.
Then her finger trailed down across the map, retracing their last
journey the year before to San Antonio and the hill country above it. In
many ways it had been a hard year, but, remembering its happy outcome,
she said to herself that it should be marked by triple lines of red.
They had gone down to the place, strangers in a strange land, they were
coming away with some of the warmest friendships of their lives binding
them fast to it. Down there Jack had had his wonderful recovery, which
was above and beyond all that their wildest hopes had pictured. And,
too, it was the last place where she would have expected to meet Phil
Tremont again. Yet he had appeared suddenly one day as if it were the
most natural thing in the world to be standing there by the huisache
tree to help her over the fence of the blue-bonnet pasture.
"By what has been, learn what will be," she repeated, and then idly
pricked that motto into the edge of the folder with a pin, as she went
on recalling various incidents. Judging by her past she had every reason
to believe that the future might be full of happy surprises; so, as she
studied the map now, it was to wonder which way the new trails would
lead her.
"Any way at all!" she thought fervently. "I don't care which direction
they take, if they'll only come around to the Happy Valley. I'm bound to
get there at any cost."
Presently she folded up the map and sat gazing dreamily out of the
window. An old song that was often on her lips came to her mind, but,
this time, she parodied it to suit her hopes:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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