Jerry waited for her host under the flickering, murmuring leaves of the cottonwood. She had seen some woman wandering diagonally from the cemetery road toward the corner of the inclosure, but she had no interest in strangers and might never have thought of her again but for a word of York's that day. He had seen the girl looking after Stellar as she made a wide flank movement. A sense of duty coupled with a strange interest in Jerry, for which he had as yet given no account to himself, was urging him to tell her, as he had told his sister, to have no traffic with the town's greatest liability, but with all of Ponk's warning he could not bring himself to speak now. "May I sit here with you awhile?" he asked, lifting his hat as he spoke. "Certainly. It is so quiet and peaceful out here, and, as I have no associations with this place, I can sit here without being unhappy or irreverent," Jerry replied. "I came out to find you. There are callers at home now, so I'll give you my message here, unless you want to follow Mr. Ponk's example and 'soar' off home." "That man interests me," Jerry declared. "He said some good things about his mother just now. And yet he's so--so funny." "Oh, Ponk's outside is against him. If he could be husked out of himself and let the community get down to the kernel of him he is really fine wheat," York said, conscious the while that he had not meant, for some reason, to praise the strutting fellow. Yet he had never felt so toward the little man before. "I have a special-delivery letter for you which came this afternoon. While you read it I'll go out to the gate and speak to the Ekblads, coming yonder." Jerry read her letter--the one Eugene had written after his conference with Jerusha Darby in the rose-arbor. In it he had been faithful to the old woman's smallest demands, but the message itself was a masterpiece. It was gracefully written, for Eugene Wellington's penmanship was art itself; and gracefully worded, and it breathed the perfumes of that lovely "Eden" on every page. Jerry closed her eyes for a moment in the midst of the reading, and the wind-swept cemetery and all the summer-seared valley of the Sage Brush vanished. The Macphersons; Ponk; Thelma Ekblad in the automobile by the cemetery gate, holding something in her arms, and her fair-haired brother, Paul; Joe Thomson (why Joe?)--all were nothing. Before her eyes all was Eugene--Eugene and "Eden." Then she read on to the end. One reading was enough. When York came back she was sitting with the letter neatly folded into its envelope again, lying in her lap.