“Don’t you worry, I’ll tend to that,” replied Amos.

Levine was taking supper with them.  “Better tell her all about it, Amos,” he said.  “You know Lydia is our partner.”

“Well, she’ll just worry,” warned Amos.  “John’s going to hold it for me, till I can get the pine cut off.  That’ll pay for the land.”

“How much did you pay for it, Mr. Levine?” asked Lydia.

Levine grinned.  “I forget!”

Lydia’s gaze was still the round, pellucid gaze of her childhood.  She sat now with her chin cupped in her palm, her blue eyes on Levine.  To the surprise of both the men, however, she said nothing.

After the supper dishes were washed, and Amos was attending to the chickens, Lydia came slowly out to the front steps where Levine was sitting.  He reached up and catching her hand pulled her down beside him on the topmost step.  She leaned her head against his arm and they sat in silence, Lydia with her eyes on the dim outline of the pine by the gate.

“Lydia,” said John, finally, “how does the Great Search go on?  We haven’t reported for a long time.”

“I don’t think I make much headway,” replied Lydia.  “The older I grow, the less I understand men and I’ve always felt as if, if there was a God, He was a man.”

“You mean male, rather than female,” agreed John.

“Lydia, dear, I wish you did have faith.”

“But do you believe, yourself?” urged Lydia.

“Yes, I know that the soul can’t die,” said the man, quietly.  “And the thing that makes me surest is the feeling I have for you, I know that I’ll have another chance.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lydia wonderingly.

“That, you’ll never know,” he replied.

“Well, I know that you’re a dear,” said the young girl, unexpectedly, “no matter how you get your Indian lands.  And I love you to death.”

She patted his cheek caressingly, and John Levine smiled sadly to himself in the darkness.

CHAPTER XIV

THE HARVARD INSTRUCTOR

“The saddest things that I have seen are the burned pine woods and the diseased Indians.”—­The Murmuring Pine.

The University campus was a huge square of green, elm dotted, that was bordered on one edge for a quarter of a mile by the lake.  The other three sides were enclosed by the college buildings, great Gothic piles of gray stone, ivy grown, with swallow haunted eaves.  One entered the campus through wide archways, that framed from the street ravishing views of lake and elm, with leisurely figures of seniors in cap and gown in the foreground.

College life was not much unlike High School life for Lydia.  She of course missed the dormitory living which is what makes University existence unique.  The cottage was nearly three miles from the campus.  Lydia took a street-car every morning, leaving the house with her father.  She was very timid at first:  suffered agony when called on to recite:  reached all her classes as early as possible and sat in a far corner to escape notice.  But gradually, among the six thousand students she began to lose her self-consciousness and to feel that, after all, she was only attending a larger High School.