e a letter for her. She didn't, of course, tell me not to
say anything about it to you, mother and daddy, but I would rather not
tell you to whom the letter is to be written. You must trust me, my
own dear daddy. It is a very simple letter, just to say that Lawrence
has disappeared and Mrs. Lawrence and the little boy are in kind hands."

"Of course we trust you," answered Colonel Fortescue, smiling. "You
are a very trusty person, Anita."

"Like my father and mother," answered Anita, and ran out of the room.
As they heard her light step tripping up the stairs, the father and
mother looked at each other with troubled eyes.

"It is to Broussard," said the Colonel, remembering his last interview
with him. "I think Broussard steadily befriended Lawrence and his
wife."

Mrs. Fortescue's candid eyes grew clouded.

"It is a strange intimacy," she said.

"It's all right," unhesitatingly replied the Colonel.

"Oh, well," said Mrs. Fortescue, touching the harpstrings, "If you are
fomenting a love affair between Anita at Fort Blizzard and Broussard in
the tropics, it is your affair."

"Elizabeth," said the Colonel, "I am not a person to foment love
affairs, or any other private and personal affairs."

"I said _if_ you were fomenting a love affair, John," replied Mrs.
Fortescue; and then there was no more music from the harp, the Colonel
going into his office and Mrs. Fortescue to the After-Clap's nursery.

In her own little room Anita was already hard at work on her letter to
Broussard. It was a very short and simple letter, telling exactly, and
only, what Mrs. Lawrence had asked, and it was signed "Sincerely
Yours." But when it was to be sealed Anita's insurgent heart cried out
to be heard, and she added a little postscript, which read:

"Gamechick is very well and sends his love. I ride him nearly every
day."

Anita would not trust her precious letter to the mail orderly, or even
Sergeant McGillicuddy or Kettle, but throwing her crimson mantle around
her, she slipped out, in the cold mist, to the letter box. For one
moment she held the letter poised in her hand before it took its flight
toward the tropics; Anita's tender heart went with the letter.

A fortnight later, the March sun having come in place of the February
snows, Mrs. McGillicuddy succeeded in dragging Mrs. Lawrence out of
doors, one day about noon, and after placing her on a bench in the glow
of the light, went off to look after the eight McG