gage."

"Patricia," said Mrs. Pendomer, soothingly, "has ideals. And ideals,
like a hare-lip or a mission in life, should be pitied rather than
condemned, when our friends possess them; especially," she continued,
buttering her waffle, "as so many women have them sandwiched between
their last attack of measles and their first imported complexion. No one
of the three is lasting, Rudolph."

"H'm!" said he.

There was another silence. The colonel desperately felt that matters
were not advancing.

"H'm!" said she, with something of interrogation in her voice.

"See here, Clarice, I have known you----"

"You have not!" cried she, very earnestly; "not by five years!"

"Well, say for some time. You are a sensible woman----"

"A man," Mrs. Pendomer lamented, parenthetically, "never suspects a
woman of discretion, until she begins to lose her waist."

"--and I am sure that I can rely upon your womanly tact, and finer
instincts,--and that sort of thing, you know--to help me out of a deuce
of a mess."

Mrs. Pendomer ate on, in an exceedingly noncommittal fashion, as he
paused, inquiringly.

"She has been reading some letters," said he, at length; "some letters
that I wrote a long time ago."

"In the case of so young a girl," observed Mrs. Pendomer, with perfect
comprehension, "I should have undoubtedly recommended a judicious
supervision of her reading-matter."

"She was looking through an old escritoire," he explained; "Jack
Charteris had suggested that some of my father's letters--during the
War, you know--. might be of value--"

He paused, for Mrs. Pendomer appeared on the verge of a question.

But she only said, "So it was Mr. Charteris who suggested Patricia's
searching the desk. Ah, yes! And then--?"

"And it was years ago--and just the usual sort of thing, though it may
have seemed from the letters--Why, I hadn't given the girl a thought,"
he cried, in virtuous indignation, "until Patricia found the
letters--and read them!"

"Naturally," she assented--"yes,--just as I read George's."

The smile with which she accompanied this remark, suggested that both
Mr. Pendomer's correspondence and home life were at times of an
interesting nature.

"I had destroyed the envelopes when she returned them," continued
Colonel Musgrave, with morose confusion of persons. "Patricia doesn't
even know who the girl was--her name, somehow, was not mentioned."

"'Woman of my heart'--'Dearest girl in all the world,'" quoted