a call to the bar. As soon as he had set up his office, they would be married. He would work till four o'clock every day at his cases—just as he did now at school—but at four o'clock sharp, he would hurry home to her, and they would go for a little walk before supper, and after supper he would read to her until it was time for her to go to bed. It was to be a feather bed, like his mother's. He would kiss her good -night, there, before he went upstairs to his attic.
He could no more have told her of all this than he could have told Conroy. But Dexter's illness ended suddenly—he was found dead on the lawn one August morning—and Don turned to her for consolation. His grief was not as bitter as it would have been six months earlier, but it left him with a feeling that he had only her now. She wrote back, in girlish sympathy, that she wished she were with him in Coulton, or he at the lake with her; that none of the boys were as nice as he. And Don, on the impulse of loneliness, shut himself up in his room and wrote his first love-letter.
He told her that he was to spend four years at college, three years at the law school, and then perhaps a year in which to get up a practice. (He had heard his father say it took a long time to work up a practice.) He did not wish to bind her—or anything like that—but if she would just write to him, and let him see her sometimes, and remember that he was waiting for her, he would not care how long he waited or how hard he worked. He would work so hard that they would be rich, and be able to travel,
