"Yes, yes," I replied. "Miss Melrose was the only girl who would listen to my praising Kansas while I was in Massachusetts. Naturally I found her delightful company." "Did he tell you about his girl here?" Tillhurst asked, a trifle maliciously, maybe. "Of course, I didn't," I broke in. "We don't tell all we know when we go East." "Nor all you have done in the East when you come back home, evidently," Tillhurst spoke significantly. "I've never heard him mention your name once, Miss Melrose." "Has he been flirting with some one, Mr. Tillhurst? He promised me faithfully he wouldn't." Her tone took on a disappointed note. "I'll promise anybody not to flirt, for I don't do it," I cried. "I came home and found this young educator trying to do me mischief with the little girl I told you about the last time I saw you. Naturally he doesn't like me." All this in a joking manner, and yet a vein of seriousness ran through it somewhere. Rachel Melrose was adroit. "We won't quarrel," she said sweetly, "now we do meet again, and when I go down to Springvale to visit your aunt, as you insisted I must do, we'll get all this straightened out. You'll come and take tea with us of course. Mr. Tillhurst has promised to come, too." The young man looked curiously at me at the mention of Rachel's visit to Springvale. A group of politicians broke in just here. "We can't have you monopolize 'the handsome giant of the Neosho' all the time," they said, laughing, with many a compliment to the charming young monopolist. "We don't blame him, of course, now, but we need him badly. Come, Baronet," and they hurried me away, giving me time only to thank her for the invitation to dine with her. At the Teft House letters were waiting for me. One from my father asking me to visit Governor Crawford and take a personal message of some importance to him, with the injunction, "Stay till you do see him." The other was a fat little envelope inscribed in Marjie's handwriting. Inside were only flowers, the red blossoms that grow on the vines in the crevices of our "Rockport," and a sheet of note paper about them with the simple message: "Always and always yours, Marjie." Willing or unwilling, I found myself in the thick of the political turmoil, and had it not been for that Indian raiding in Northwest Kansas, I should have plunged into politics then and there, so strong a temptation it is to control men, if opportunity offers. It was late before I could get out of the council and rush to my room to write a hurried but loving letter to Marjie. I had to be brief to get it into the mails. So I wrote only of what was first in my thoughts; herself, and my longing to see her, of the noisy political strife, and of the Saline River and Solomon River outrages, I hurried this letter to the outgoing stage and fell in with the crowd gathering late in the dining-room. I was half way through my meal before I remembered Rachel's invitation.