the ones you
received. Indeed, doctor, it is impossible to connect Abbot with it in
any way."

The doctor's face is covered by his hands. In ten minutes or less he
must be at _her_ side. What can he tell his little girl? What shall he
say? What possible, probable story can man invent to cover a case so
cruel as this? He hardly hears the colonel's words. He is
thinking--thinking with a bursting heart and whirling brain. For a time
all sense of the loss of his only son seems deadened in face of this
undreamed-of, this almost incredible shadow that has come to blight the
sweet and innocent life that is so infinitely dear to him. What can he
say to Bessie when he meets those beautiful, pleading, trusting, anxious
eyes? She has borne up so bravely, silently, patiently. Their journey
has been trying and full of fatigue, but once at Frederick he has left
her in the hands of a sympathetic woman, the wife of the proprietor of
the only tavern in which a room could be had, and, promising to return
as soon as he could see the lieutenant, he has gone away on his quest
with hopeful heart. A soldier claiming to be of the--th Massachusetts
told them that very morning at the Baltimore station that Mr. Abbot was
well enough to be up and about. It is barely nine o'clock now. In less
than an hour there will be a train going back. All he can think of is
that they must go--go as quick as possible. They have nothing now to
keep them here, and he has one secret to guard from all--his little
girl's. No one must know, none suspect that. In the bitterness of
desolation, still stunned and bewildered by the cruelty of the blow that
has come upon them, his mind is clear on that point. If possible no one,
except those people at the tavern, must know she was with him. None must
suspect--above all--none must suspect the bitter truth. It would crush
her like a bruised and trodden flower.

"If--if it had been a correspondence where there was a woman in the
case," begins the colonel again--and the doctor starts as though stung,
and his wrinkled hands wring each other under the heavy travelling-shawl
he wears--"I could understand the thing better. Quite a number of
romantic correspondences have grown up between our soldiers and young
girls at home through the medium of these mittens and things; they seem
to have lost their old significance. But you give me to understand
that--that there was none?"

"The letters were solely about my son, all that ever c