MY ALWAYS DEAR JERRY,--I should have written you days ago, but I did not get back to "Eden" until you had been gone a week. We are all so eager to hear how you are, and to know about the Swaim estate which you went to find. But we are a hundred times more eager to see your face here again. I wish you were here to-night, for I have been in the depths of doubt and indecision, from which your presence would have lifted me. I hope I have done the right thing, now it is done, and I'll wait to hear from you more eagerly than I ever waited for a letter before. Yet I feel sure you will approve of my course after you get over your surprise and have taken time to think carefully. I had a long heart-to-heart talk with Aunt Jerry to-day. Don't smile and say a purse-to-purse talk. Full purses don't talk to empty ones. They speak a different language. But this to-day was a real confidence game as you might say. I received the confidence if I didn't die as game as you would wish me to. To be plain, little cousin mine, I want you dreadfully to come back, so much so that I have decided to give up painting for the present and take a clerkship in the bank with Uncle Cornie's partners. I can see your eyes open wide with surprise and disappointment when I tell you that Aunt Jerry has really converted me to her way of thinking. My hours are easy and the pay is good. Not so much as I had hoped to have some day from my brush and may have yet, if this work doesn't make me fat and lazy, for there is really very little responsibility about it, just a decent accuracy. This makes so many things possible, you see, and then I have the satisfaction of knowing I am doing a service for Aunt Jerry--and, to be explicit--to put myself where I shall not have to worry over things when you come home. So I'm happy now. And when you get here I shall begin to live again. I seem to be staying here now. Staying and waiting for something. Nobody really lives at "Eden" without little Jerry to keep us all alive and keyed up. Nobody to take the big car over the bluff road, beautiful as it is--for you know I'm too big a coward to drive it and to do a hundred things I'd do if you were here to brace me up. Write me at once, little cousin, and say you will come home just as soon as you have seen all of that God-forsaken country you care to look at. And meantime I'll write as often as you want me to. I think of you every day and remember you in my prayers every night. You remember I told you I couldn't pray out in Kansas. May the Lord be good to you and make you love Him more than you think you do now, and bring you safe and soon to our beautiful "Eden." Yours, EUGENE.