“How queer for me to be saying anything like that to Eugenia,” he thought.  “How much she must have changed to be able to write me the letter she did.”  He opened the box and took out the little ring.  As he turned it around on the tip of his finger, he remembered that it was almost time for her to be coming home.  The house party would soon be at an end.

“Hardly worth while to send it to her,” he thought.  “She will be coming home so soon.  When we are down at the seashore, I will give it to her.”

The letter she had written him lay open on the table before him.  That letter, blotted with penitent tears, had brought a new tenderness into his heart for her.  It had revealed a different Eugenia from the one he had been accustomed to thinking of as his little daughter.  Somehow she seemed nearer and dearer than she had ever done before, and he wanted to take her in his arms and tell her so.  The next instant the thought flashed across his mind, “Well, why not?  This is the time I have arranged to take my vacation, and there is nothing to hinder my going down to Kentucky after her.  Jack Sherman is always urging me to visit Locust, and I’ll give the child a surprise.  She dislikes to travel with only Eliot.”

Eugenia knew nothing of the telegram her Cousin Elizabeth received next morning, so several days later she could hardly believe her eyes, when she saw her father spring out of the carriage in front of the house, and come bounding up the steps, between the white pillars of the vine-covered porch.  Tall, handsome, smiling, he came toward her, his arms outstretched, and, after one amazed glance, she ran into them, crying, “Oh, papa! papa!  I’m so glad!”

“I couldn’t do without my little girl any longer,” he said.  “I had to come for her.”

Mrs. Sherman came out just then with the warmest of welcomes, and Eugenia rushed up-stairs for a moment, to tell Betty about her surprise and to hurry Joyce and Lloyd down to greet her father.

“I am going to begin all over again now,” she said to herself, as she went up the stairs.  “I’ll be as good, and sweet to him as he deserves.  I’ll let him see how proud I am of him, too.  It’s queer, but somehow I really love him better since I have thought so much about Betty’s Memory roads.  Well, I shall certainly try my best from now on to leave a happy one behind for him.”

He gave her the ring that night, the little golden lover’s knot with the name of Tusitala engraved inside, to remind her always of the Road of the Loving Heart, that she might leave in the world after her.  With her head on his shoulder and his arm around her, they talked long, and freely together, as they had never done before.

Once he looked at her with a quizzical little smile.  “I never realised until to-night,” he said, “how old you are, or how companionable you can be.  But we’ll always be good chums after this, won’t we?”

“Yes,” she answered, giving his ear a playful tweak, and mischievously imitating his tone and manner.  “And I never realised until to-night how young you are, or how companionable you can be.  I believe that if you’d been at this house party from the beginning, you’d have been playing with us by this time, like Bobby and the other boys.