delightful hour of the twenty-four. As for Betty Jo,--well, it was
really Betty Jo who established the custom and developed it to that
point where it was of such importance.

Auntie Sue was too experienced from her life-long study of boys and
girls not to observe the deepening of the friendship between the man and
the woman whom she had brought together. But if the dear old lady felt
any twinges of an apprehensive conscience, when she saw the pair day
after day coming down the mountain-side through the long shadows of
the late afternoon, she very promptly banished them, and, quite
consistently, with what Brian called her "River philosophy," made no
attempt to separate these two life currents, which, for the time at
least, seemed to be merging into one.

And often, as the three sat together on the porch after supper to watch
the sunsets, or later in the evening as Auntie Sue sat with her sewing
while they were busy with their work and unobserving, the dear old lady
would look at them with a little smile of tender meaning, and into the
gentle eyes would come that far-away look that was born of the memories
that had so sweetened the long years of her life, and of the hope and
dream of a joy unspeakable that awaited her beyond the sunset of her
day.

In her long letter to Betty Jo, asking the girl to come, Auntie Sue had
told the young woman the main facts of Brian's history as she knew them,
omitting only the man's true name and the name of the bank. She had even
mentioned her conviction that there had been a woman in his trouble. But
Auntie Sue had not mentioned in her letter the money she had lost; nor
did she now know that Brian had himself told Betty Jo at the time of
their first meeting.