attain his object by careful and skilful approaches. He had shown
himself such an impetuous wooer that she might well doubt his
persistence; now he would prove himself so patient and considerate
that she could not doubt him.

When they parted at the seaside Hilland was called to the far West by
important business interests. In response to his earnest pleas, in
which he movingly portrayed his loneliness in a rude mining village,
she said he might write to her occasionally, and he had written so
quietly and sensibly, so nearly as a friend might address a friend,
that she felt there could be no harm in a correspondence of this
character. During the winter season their letters had grown more
frequent, and he with consummate skill had gradually tinged his words
with a warmer hue. She smiled at his artifice. There was no longer any
need of it, for by the wood fire, when all the house was still and
wrapped in sleep, she had become fully revealed unto herself. She
found that she had a woman's heart, and that she had given it
irrevocably to Warren Hilland.

She did not tell him so--far from it. The secret seemed so strange, so
wonderful, so exquisite in its blending of pain and pleasure, that she
did not tell any one. Hers was not the nature that could babble of the
heart's deepest mysteries to half a score of confidants. To him first
she would make the supreme avowal that she had become his by a sweet
compulsion that had at last proved irresistible, and even he must
again seek that acknowledgment directly, earnestly. He was left to
gather what hope he could from the fact that she did not resent his
warmer expressions, and this leniency from a girl like Grace St. John
meant so much to him that he did gather hope daily. Her letters were
not nearly so frequent as his, but when they did come he fairly