"I want--as I wanted when a schoolboy--"to know you." I want you to know me. There is no way in which this can be accomplished for a long time to come except by letters. Won't you agree to this regular interchange? I don't mean that which I presume you mean when you say it will be "interesting to hear from Colombia." You mean, I suppose, a letter now and then, at the intervals which conventionality imposes at the beginning of a correspondence, possibly shortening as time goes on, but taking at least half a year to get under way. I want it to get under way at once! We can receive mail but once a fortnight at the best up here, and there are often delays. So if you answer my letters as soon as you get them I shall not hear from you too often. Please! "I am an engineer, you know; that means a fellow who is trained to action--all the time. If he can't get results fast enough by working his men by day he works them by night also--day-and-night shifts--and works with them, too, much of the time. In that way--well, samples taken from our south drift assay more than we had dared to hope a ton, but not till we got well in. The vein may pinch out, of course, but there are no signs of it. I expect it to widen instead, and grow richer in quality. So--if you'll forgive the miner's analogy--with another vein I know of--the finest sort of gold!" So the correspondence began. It was easy for a young woman of Dorothy's discernment to see that here was no case for a long-distance flirtation, if she had wanted one. From the moment when she had flung her left hand into Waldron's right, and that other moment when she had told him with absolute truth that she was not afraid with him beside her, he had taken her at her word. She could not play with him, even if he had been near her; far less now that thousands of miles separated them. She answered with a letter of twice the length of her first one, a gay little letter, full of incident and her comments thereon. The reply came promptly, and this time it was a long one. He told her many details of the situation as it was developing in these new, extraordinarily promising mines; and she found it as fascinating as a fairy tale. But, of course, although she read these pages many times over, she read more often certain opening and closing passages. One ran like this: