"Poor Jack Dysart! To-day's papers are saying such horridly unpleasant things about the rich men with whom he was rather closely associated in business affairs several years ago. I read, but I do not entirely comprehend. "The New York papers seem unusually gloomy this summer; nothing but predictions of hard times coming, and how many corporations the attorney-general is going to proceed against, and wicked people who loot metropolitan railways, and why the district-attorney doesn't do his duty--which you say he does--oh, dear; I expect that Scott and Kathleen and I will have to take in boarders this winter; but if nobody has any money, nobody can pay board, so everybody will be ruined and I don't very much care, for I could teach school, only who is to pay my salary if there's no money to pay it with? Oh, dear! what nonsense I am writing--only to keep on writing, because it seems to bring you a little nearer--my own--my Duane--my comrade--the same, same little boy who ran away from his nurse and came into our garden to fight my brother and--fall in love with his sister! Oh, Fate! Oh, Destiny! Oh, Duane Mallett! "Here is a curious phenomenon. Listen: "Away from you I have a woman's courage to tell you how I long for you, how my heart and my arms ache for you. But when I am with you I'm less of a woman and more of a girl--a girl not yet accustomed to some things--always guarded, always a little reticent, always instinctively recoiling from the contact I really like, always a little on the defensive against your lips, in spite of myself--against your arms--where, somehow, I cannot seem to stay long at a time--will not endure it--_cannot_, somehow. "Yet, here, away from you, I so long for your embrace, and cannot imagine it too long, too close, too tender to satisfy my need of you. "And this is my second letter to you within the hour--one hour after your departure. "Oh, Duane, I do truly miss you so! I go about humming that air you found so quaint: "'Lisetto quittee la plaine, Moi perdi bonheur a moi, Yeux a moi semblent fontaine, Depuis moi pas mire toi,' and there's a tear in every note of it, and I'm the most lonely girl on the face of the earth to-day. "GERALDINE QUI PLEURE." "P.S.--Voici votre pipe, Monsieur!" CHAPTER XIV THE PROPHETS