No other name, Our Father, no other name!”
CHAPTER XXV.
They were gone; and San Salvador resumed its usual life, too happy to have a history. A messenger went out and a messenger came in once a month, and Dylar held in his hand the threads of all their delicate far-stretching web.
Iona before going had obtained his approval of some of her plans, which were in fact his own, and the first messenger from her went directly to the Olives, where he bought a large tract of land.
“Do not seek now to preserve a compact territory,” she said. “You may find yourself hemmed in. Buy some of the rising land southward along the river, and let the next purchase connect it with the Olives. Let that connection be made as soon as possible.”
“Iona has force and foresight,” Dylar said. “It is well. I sympathize with her impatience. But I know my duty to be more one of conservation than of enterprise.”
After leaving his wife for a week, which he spent at the castle, “I have bought land all along the river for two miles,” he told her; “and our friend has bought a tract crossing mine, but not joining it. It is sand and stones; but planted first with canes, can be coaxed to something better. Water is going to be as important a question with us as it was with the Israelites. I thought of them as I walked over my parched domain, and it occurred to me as never before, that a spring of water is one of the most beautiful things on earth, to the mind as well as the eyes.”
“I am glad that you have gratified Iona’s first expressed wish,” his wife said. “Naturally, the first wind of the world in her face fanned the idea to a flame. She is now occupying herself with other thoughts.”
Iona was occupied with other thoughts.
Let us take two or three glimpses of her through a clairvoyant’s mind.