"Dear Honor--" Carter had written in a ragged scrawl unlike his usual firm hand--"Will you try to forgive me? You are the kindest and least bitter person in the world; I know you can forgive me. But--and this will be harder--can you forget last night? I promise to deserve it, if you will. Will you pretend to yourself that it never happened, and just remember the good days we've had this summer, and that--in spite of my losing my head--I'm your friend, and Jimsy's friend? Will you, Honor?" And Honor Carmody, looking with blurred eyes at the sea, wished she might wave again and reassuringly to the boy on the steamer, facing the long voyage so drearily. Then she realized that she still could, in a sense, wave to him. The steamer stopped at Naples and she could send a telegram to him there, and he would not have to cross the wide ocean under that guilty weight. She put on her hat and sped to the telegraph office, and there, because his note had ended with a question--had been indeed all a question--and because she was the briefest of feminine creatures, and because the _Signorina_ was waiting luncheon for her and did not enjoy waiting, she wired the one word, "Yes," and signed her name. "Carter got a telegram," said Mildred Lorimer to her husband. "I wonder what it could have been. Did he say?" "He didn't mention it," said Stephen. "About those silk shirts which weren't finished, I daresay. Certainly not bad news, by the look of him." When Carter Van Meter reached Los Angeles and his tearfully happy mother he drew her into the library and closed the door. "Mater," he said with an odd air of intense repressed excitement, "I'm going to show you something, but you must promise me on your honor not to breathe it to a living soul, least of all, Mrs. Lorimer." "Oh, dearest," gasped his mother, "I promise faithfully----" He took Honor's telegram out of his wallet and unfolded it and smoothed it out for her to read the single word it contained. Then, at her glad cry, "Sh ... Mater! It isn't--exactly--what you think. I can't explain now. But it's a hope; it may--I believe it will, one day--lead to the thing we both want!" He folded it again carefully into its creases and put it back into his wallet and he was breathing hard. CHAPTER IX Ethel Bruce-Drummond was better than her word. She did not wait for the Christmas holidays but went down to Florence early in December for Honor's first concert, and she wrote many pages to Stephen Lorimer.