With brave commonplaces they said good-bye when the train pulled in.

Bravely she waved at him from the open window of the coach.

And bravely Brian stood there watching until the train rounded the curve and disappeared from sight between the hills.
The world through which Brian Kent drove that afternoon on his way back to Auntie Sue and Judy in the little log house by the river was a very dull and uninteresting world indeed.

All its brightness and its beauty seemed suddenly to have vanished.

And as "Old Prince" jogged patiently on his way, sleepily content with thoughts of his evening meal of hay and grain, the man's mind was disturbed with thoughts which he dared not own even to his innermost self.
"Circumstances to a man," Auntie Sue had said, "always meant a woman." And Brian Kent, while he never under any pressure would have admitted it, knew within his deepest self that it was a woman who had set him adrift on the dark river that dreadful night when he had cursed the world which he thought he was leaving forever.
"Circumstances" in the person of Auntie Sue had saved him from destruction, and, in the little log house by the river, had brought about his Re-Creation.
And then, when that revelation of his crime toward Auntie Sue had come, and the labor of months, with all that it implied of the enduring salvation of himself and the happiness of Auntie Sue, hung wavering in the balance, it was the "Circumstances" of Betty Jo's coming that had set him in the right current of action again.
What waited for him around the next bend in the river, Brian wondered,--calm and peaceful waters, with gently flowing currents, or the wild tumult of dangerous rapids wherein he would be forced to fight for his very existence?
Would Betty Jo succeed as his agent to the publishers?
If she did succeed in finding a publisher to accept his book, would the reading public receive his message?
And if that followed, what then?
When Betty Jo's mission in the East was accomplished, she was to return to Auntie Sue for the summer.