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94 change in John Taylor. He had gone away a cynical, blase, conceited young man of the world; he was losing that cynicism and indifference; he was becoming as enthusiastic, as impulsive as a university sophomore, and as wrought up over his success as a normal twelve-year-old is over the capture of his first fish and game. And to Marcia Murray his rewards were about as significant.

In this letter he told of the sale of his first lumber and figured for her the approximate profit; he forecasted the grand total that his venture would yield, setting it off with underscoring and exclamation points, but as the girl read, her thin lips drew up in the suggestion of a curl. Where a month ago his letters had consisted of a dignified and assured love-making, they now chattered on about people who did not interest her at all; Humphrey Bryant, of whom John wrote as a firm friend; about a person named Black Joe—evidently not colored—who refused John his confidence; and about Helen Foraker, with a repression and an irregularity in the style which Marcia did not detect.

She finished this letter:

"I'm awfully sorry, but it won't be possible for me to spend much time at the house party at Dick Mason's lodge. You go, by all means, and I may be able to spend Sundays there. It's hard, Marcia, to give up that sort of thing, but I'm beginning to feel that my father wasn't so far wrong in thinking I didn't amount to much. The more I think of it the less I am inclined to ever ask a favor of him. This that I am making is all my own."

Her eyes lingered on that paragraph and her slender brows quirked; she glanced idly back over the letter,