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Rh hands which he would have allowed there. Or was it his own reckless temper which had denied him?

Suddenly Kennedy came clattering upstairs cheerfully, and Dick thrust the picture back in his breast and finished his packing. But before he slept he wrote a few brief lines to Jennifer.

That letter went East by the same mail as Tempest's; but when they lay in her lap together Jennifer opened Tempest's first. And after that she picked up the sheet and the torn envelope and the other envelope with that familiar black writing, and carried them all up to her room and locked the door on herself. Twice over she read Tempest's letter. Its quiet, curbed language told very little; not much more than Slicker had told. But it made her fear to open that other letter. Her pulses beat until they stifled her, and her eyes were blurred. She knew, with a sharpness, with a terrible sureness, that Dick meant more to her than anything—than anyone. And was this written to say that she did not mean anything to him any more? She set her teeth in her lip, ripped the envelope, and pulled out the big sheet with its strong black writing. There were only a few lines in the middle of it.

"I go North in the morning for perhaps a year. I have tried to pull a man out of the mud and got further in myself than I expected. You will understand that this was likely to happen to me. And understand that you are in my life and my heart and my very soul. I could not tear you out though I tried until the world's end, Jennifer."

The heavy twist of his initials finished it, and Jennifer stared at it with flushed cheeks and shining eyes. She had no right to be glad. But she was glad; frankly, gloriously glad. This good-bye of his on the edge of one of those long plunges into the unknown held none of the suave, idle words with which he could cover his thoughts so well. It was a flagrant disobedience of her commands. It was a daring defiance of all which Tempest's letter told. It gave no explanation, no apology, no penitence.