waste, and whole bands of adventurers have gone into the desert
in the search of these mines, never to return.

When the time for Lane's departure came Echo wept at the thought
of losing for so long a time the close companion of her childhood
and the sympathetic confidant of her youthful thoughts and
aspirations. Dick, in whom friendship for Echo had long before
ripened into conscious love, took her tears as evidence that she
was similarly affected toward him, and he allowed all the
suppressed passion of his nature full vent in a declaration of
love. The girl was deeply moved by this revelation of the heart
of a strong man made tender as a woman's by a power centering in
her own humble self, and, being utterly without experience of the
emotion even in its protective form of calf-love, which is the
varioloid of the genuine infection, she imagined through sheer
sympathy that she shared his passion. So she assented with
maidenly reserve to his plea that she promise to marry him when
he should return and provide a home for her. Her more cautious
mother secured a modification of this pledge by limiting the time
that Echo should wait for him to one year. If at the expiration
of that period Lane did not return to claim her promise, or did
not write making satisfactory arrangements for continuance of the
engagement, Echo was to be considered free to marry whom she
chose.

Soon after Lane's departure Mrs. Allen persuaded the Colonel to
send Echo east to a New England finishing-school for girls, where
her mother hoped that her budding love for Lane might be nipped
in the frigid atmosphere of intellectual culture, if not, indeed,
supplanted by a saving interest in young men in general, and,