Honor was surprised and pleased to find how little she minded living abroad, after all. They had arrived, the boy and herself, in the months between their secret understanding and their separation, at the amazed conclusion that it was going to be easier to be apart until that bright day when they might be entirely and forever together. At the best, three interminable years stretched bleakly between them and marriage; they had to mark time as best they could. She liked Florence, she liked the mountainous _Signorina_, her stepfather's friend, and she liked her work. If it had not been for Jimsy King she would without doubt have loved it, but there was room in her simple and single-track consciousness for only one engrossing and absorbing affection. She wrote to him every day, bits of her daily living, and mailed a fat letter every week, and every week or oftener came his happy scrawl from Stanford. Things went with him there as they had gone at L. A. High,--something less, naturally, of hero worship and sovereignty, but a steadily rising tide of triumph. He chronicled these happenings briefly and without emphasis. "Skipper dear," he would write in his crude and hybrid hand, "I've made the Freshman team all right and it's a pretty fair to middling bunch and I guess we'll stack up pretty well against the Berkeley babes from what I hear, and they made me captain. It seems kind of natural, and I have three fellows from the L. A. team,--Burke and Estrada and Finley." He was madly rushed by the best fraternities and chose naturally the same one as Carter Van Meter,--one of the best and oldest and most powerful. He made the baseball team in the spring, and the second fall the San Francisco papers' sporting pages ran his picture often and hailed him as the Cardinal's big man. Honor read hungrily every scrap of print which came to her,--her stepfather taking care that every mention of Jimsy King reached her. It was in his Sophomore year that he played the lead in the college play and Honor read the newspapers limp and limber--"James King in the lead did a remarkable piece of work." "King, Stanford's football star, surprised his large following by his really brilliant performance." "Well-known college athlete demonstrates his ability to act." Honor knew the play and she could shut her eyes and see him and hear him in the hero's part, and her love and pride warmed her like a fire. She had not gone home that first summer. Mildred Lorimer and Carter's mother managed that, between them, in spite of Stephen's best efforts, and, that decided, Jimsy King went with his father to visit one of the uncles at his great _hacienda_ in old Mexico. Mrs. Van Meter and her son spent his vacation on the Continent and had Honor with them the greater part of the time. She met their steamer at Naples and Carter could see the shining gladness of her face long before he could reach her and speak to her, and he glowed so that his mother's eyes were wet.