Mary Ware's Promised Land

In Phil Tremont's office desk, in an inner drawer reserved for private papers, lay a package of letters fastened together by a broad rubber band. "From the Little Vicar," it was labelled, and Mary's astonishment would have been great, could she have known that every letter she had ever written him was thus preserved. He had kept the first ones, written in a childish, painstaking hand, because they chronicled the doings of the family at Ware's Wigwam in such an amusing and characteristic way. The letters after that time had been few and far between until her final return to Lone-Rock, but each one had been kept for some different reason. It had contained a particularly laughable description of some of her Warwick Hall escapades, or some original view of life and the world in general which made it worth preserving.

Then when Mrs. Ware's letters ceased, and at Phil's urgent request Mary took up her mother's custom of writing regularly to him, he kept them because they revealed so much of herself. So brave, so womanly, so strong she had grown, bearing her great sorrow as the Jester did his hidden sword, to prove that "undaunted courage was the jewel of her soul." All during the lonely summer after her mother's death he expected to go to see her in the fall, but the work which held him in Mexico was not finished, and too much depended upon its successful completion for him to ask for leave of absence.