“I shouldn’t feel that I could embark on anything of the sort if I felt certain of Guy’s return within a comparatively short time,” she corrected. “If he comes back and approves of my idea we ought to execute it together. That would be as it should be. If I knew he were not going to return for five or ten years I would go ahead. Because five or ten years would change all of us so much that an absolutely new adjustment would be necessary, anyway. And it would be as easily made in an entirely different setting as in the old one but a little altered--more easily, I have no doubt. You must remember, Tommy, that after years of any absence we always return to make rediscoveries. The delight is in finding something essential and unchanged in what is superficial and very much changed. If things are outwardly the same we are disappointed and stop there with our disappointment--we never do get beneath the surface again.” Big Tom Lupton, with his simple way of viewing everything about him, felt himself beyond his depth. “How will you decide what to do?” he asked, finally. “This winter will tell me,” Mary Vanton asserted. “I can do nothing about it before spring--I won’t, at least. If by spring I have received no word, if there is then no indication, nothing to guide me, I shall have to go ahead in my own fashion, take all our lives in my own hands, run my own risks, make my own mistakes, stand or fall by what I do and the way I do it.” XIII Richard Hand had taken John Vanton to a school in New Jersey and had seen him settled there before going back to New York to prepare for a job in Arizona. The Western enterprise necessitated a long absence from his office in lower Broadway, and made it improbable that he would be able to see the Vantons for nearly a year. But late in October Mary Vanton got a letter from him in which he said: Things are in such shape here that I think I shall be able to run away for a couple of weeks at Christmas time, and if you like I will go to the school and pick up John, who will be coming home about then for the holidays. I am going to invite myself to come and stay with you part of the time I am East--the first part of it. After Christmas I shall have to get back to the New York office and clean up some work there. May I come? I do not suppose you have heard from Guy, though I sincerely hope you may have. I made some inquiries in New York and did a little investigation by wire. Through a friend in Washington I had a search made of records of the Federal Employment Bureaus in some of the cities and we found that under his own name he had been shipped on a British vessel, the _Sea Wanderer_, of Liverpool, sailing from San Francisco to Leith, Scotland. That was months ago.