compared to the
present with its degradation of vice? Ah! she had it! What would ever
move her as that could and must?

When the trumpets rang out their sunset call and the boom of the evening
gun shook the windows in Fort Warrener and Nellie Travers came running
up-stairs again to her room, she started at the sight that met her eyes.
There stood Mrs. Rayner, like Juno in wrath inflexible, glaring at her
from the commanding height of which she was so proud, and pointing in
speechless indignation at the little note that lay upon the open
portfolio.

For a moment neither spoke. Then Miss Travers, who had turned very
white, but whose blue eyes never flinched and whose lips were set and
whose little foot was tapping the carpet ominously, thus began:

"Kate, I do not recognize your right to overhaul my desk or supervise my
correspondence."

"Understand this first, Cornelia," said Mrs. Rayner, who hated the
baptismal name as much as did her sister, and used it only when she
desired to be especially and desperately impressive: "I found it by
accident. I never dreamed of such a possibility as this. I never, even
after what I have seen and heard, could have believed you guilty of
this; but, now that I have found it, I have the right to ask, what are
its contents?"

"I decline to tell you."

"Do you deny my right to inquire?"

"I will not discuss that question now. The other is far graver. I will
not tell you, Kate, except this: there is no word there that an engaged
girl should not write."

"Of that I mean to satisfy myself, or rather--"

"You will not open it, Kate. No! Put that letter down! You have never
known me to prevaricate in the faintest degree, and you have no excuse
for doubting. I will furnish a copy of that for Mr. Van Antwerp at any
time; but you cannot see it."

"You still persist in your wicked and unnatural intimacy with that man,
even after all that I have told you. Now for the last time hear me: I
have striven not to tell you this; I have striven not to sully your
thoughts by such a revelation; but, since nothing else will check you,
tell it I must, and what I tell you my husband told me in sacred
confidence, though soon enough it will be a scandal to the whole
garrison."

And when darkness settled down on Fort Warrener that starlit April
evening and the first warm breeze from the south came sighing about the
casements and one by one the lights appeared along officers' row, there
was no light