"We three in what was once white," said Murray, as he stood by the trap, "are a pretty sorry-looking crowd to go back all together. Why may I not change places with Peter, and drive the Bell family home?"
Ross chuckled as he winked at Jane, and she recalled his prophecy of some days earlier. But it was he and Nancy who took the back seat of the trap, leaving Rufus and Shirley in the surrey, to carry on an acquaintance which had developed to great friendliness in the Townsend tennis-court, where the children had played every evening throughout the summer.
Up in his own room Murray took from his pocket a slip of paper Jane had given him as she said good night, and unfolding it as if it were a message from a royal hand, he read it slowly through. The expectation of this message had been warm all through the pleasant drive home in the twilight.
The words of Jane's quotation were these:--and as it happened that he had never seen them before, they came to him at this crisis of his life with peculiar force.
"Life is an arrow--therefore you must know
What mark to aim at, how to use the bow--
Then draw it to the head, and let it go!"
There was a little constriction in Murray's own throat as he studied the brave words. He saw at a flash their deeper meaning. "Make myself fit to live my life," he thought "and then--whether it's the life I want to live or not--let it go! Jane, you know how to fit the arrow to my hand--bless you! I will draw it to the head--and let it go!"
CHAPTER IX
SNAP SHOTS
"A letter from Montana for Miss Jane Bell," observed Peter, distributing the mail at the breakfast-table one May morning, nine months after the picnic at Grandfather Bell's farm. "It strikes me these Montana letters are beginning to arrive with astonishing regularity."
"They began," declared Ross, enjoying the sight of the sudden colour in Jane's face, as she tucked the letter into her belt and tried vainly to look unconscious as she went on serving the family from a big dish of oatmeal porridge, "by coming modestly once in about three or four weeks. Then they got to once a fortnight--that was in midwinter. Along about April----"