Spee ae ee ange : = --#{ To CARIBOO AND BACK }-- out of the ground and was spotted and seamed with moss, all black and dry after the winter frosts. He yielded to the temptation to sit down on it for a minute or two, just to think about what he would say when he got back to the kind lady who had given him the York shilling; how he would break the news that he had lost her little girl. So he climbed up to the top of the stone. Some time before this Mr. Wilfer had come home to the red brick mansion. He was now engaged in a very important conversation with his wife; so important that neither of them gave a thought to little Betty for some time. Frederick Wilfer was a young lawyer whose heart was not in his work and never had been. He studied a profession to please his parents; also because he could not discover any way of gratifying his one romantic desire for travel and adventure. So he tried not to think of the impossible and to settle down. Then, while he was still quite young, he married Betty’s mother, a lovely girl he had known from child- hood, and after that the law practice became a matter of necessity. He worked hard and [24]