H

CHAPTER XIV

A MYSTERIOUS LETTER

E was at home now, waiting impatiently for the
General's answer to his letter. Two weeks had

passed and he had not received it. But she had explained in her letters that her father had returned the day he left, had a talk with McLeod, and left on important business. They were expecting his return at any moment.

It was a new revelation of life he found in their first love letters. He never knew that he could write before. He sat for hours at his desk in his law office and poured out to her his dreams, hopes and ambitions. All the poetry of youth, and the passion and beauty of life, he put into those letters.

He wrote to her every day and she answered every other day. She wrote in half tearful apology that her mother disapproved of a daily letter, and she added wistfully, "I should like to write to you twice a day. Take the will for the deed, and as you love me, be sure to continue yours daily."

And on the days the letter came, with eager trembling hands he seized it, without waiting for the rest of his mail or his papers. With set face, and quick nervous step, he would mount the stairs to his office, lock his door and sit down to devour it. He would hold it in his hands sometimes for ten minutes just to laugh and muse over it and try to guess what new trick of phrase she had used

to express her love. He was surprised at her brilliance and wit. He had not held her so deep a thinker on the serious things of life as these letters had showed, nor had he noticed how keen her sense of humour. He was so busy looking at her beautiful face, and drinking the love-light from her eyes, he had overlooked these things when with her. Now they flashed on him as a new treasure, that would enrich his life.

At the end of two weeks when the General had not answered his letter he began to grow nervous. A vague feeling of fear grew on him. Something had happened to darken his future. He felt it by a subtle telepathy of sympathetic thought. He was gloomy and depressed all day after he had received and feasted on the wittiest letter she had ever written. What could it mean he asked himself a thousand times-some shadow had fallen across their lives. He knew it as clearly as if the revelation of its misery were already unfolded.

He went to the post-office on the next day he was to receive a letter, crushed with a sense of foreboding. He waited until the mail was all distributed and the general delivery window flung open before he approached his box. He was afraid to look at her letter. He slowly opened the box.

There was nothing in it!

Sam, you're not holding out my letter to tease me, old boy?" he asked pathetically.

Sam was about to joke him about the uncertainties ot love, when his eye rested on his drawn face.

"Lord no, Charlie," he protested, "you know I wouldn't treat you like that."

"Then look again, you may have dropped it."

Sam turned and looked carefully over the floor, over and under his desks and tables and returned.

"No, but it may have been thrown into the wrong bag

by that fool mail clerk on the train. You may get it to-morrow."

He turned away and walked to his office, forgetting his key in the open box. The vague sense of calamity that weighed on his heart for the past two days, now became a reality.

He sat in his office all the afternoon in a dull stupor of suspense. He tried to read her last letter over. But the pages would get blurred and fade out of sight, and he would wake to find he had been staring at one sentence for an hour.

He knew his foster mother would be all sympathy and tenderness if he told her, but somehow he hadn't the heart. She had led him to his love. He had been so boyishly and frankly happy boasting to her of his success, he sickened at the thought of telling her. He went out for a walk in the woods, and lay down alone beside a brook like a wounded animal.

The next day he watched his box again with the hope that Sam's guess might be right, and the missing letter would come. But, instead of the big square-cut envelope he had waited for, he received a bulky letter in an oldfashioned masculine handwriting with the post mark of Independence, and a mill mark in the upper left hand

corner.

He did not have to look twice at that letter. It was the sealed verdict of his jury. He locked his office door. It was long and rambling, full of a kindly sympathy expressed in a restrained manner. He could not believe at first that so outspoken a man as the General could have written it. The substance of its meaning, however, was plain enough. He meant to say that as he was not in a position to make a suitable home at present for a wife, and as he disapproved of long engagements, it seemed

better that no engagement should be entered into or announced.

He stared at this letter for an hour, trying to grasp the mystery that lay back of its halting, half-contradictory sentences. He did not know till long afterwards that the General had written it with two blue eyes tearfully watching him, and waiting to read it; that now and then there was the sound of a great sob, and two arms were around his neck, and a still white face lying on his shoulder, and that tears had washed all the harshness and emphasis out of what he had meant to write, and all but blotted out any meaning to what he did write.

But withal it was clear enough in its import. It meant that the General had haltingly but authoritatively denied his suit. He instantly made up his mind to ask an interview at his home, and know plainly all his reasons for this change of attitude. He wrote his letter and posted it immediately by return mail. He knew that the request would precipitate a crisis, and he trembled at the outcome. Either her father would hesitate and receive him, or end it with a crash of his imperious will.

CHAPTER XV

A BLOW IN THE DARK

HE noon mail brought Gaston no answer. At night he felt sure it would come.

TH

When the wagon dashed up to the post-office that night it was fifteen minutes late. He was walking up and down the street on the opposite pavement along the square, keeping under the shadows of the trees. He turned, quickly crossed the street, and stood inside the office, listening with a feeling of strange abstraction to the tramp of the postmaster's feet back and forth as he distributed the mail. He never knew before what a tragedy might be concealed in the thrust of a bit of folded paper into a tiny glass-eyed box. As he waited, fearing to face his fate, he remembered the pathetic figure of a grey-haired old man who stood there one day hanging on that desk softly talking to himself. He was a stranger at the Springs, and they were alone in the office together. Now and then he brushed a tear from his eyes, glanced timidly at the window of the general delivery, starting at every quick movement inside as though afraid the window had opened. Gaston had gone up close to the old man, drawn by the look of anguish in his dignified face. The stranger intuitively recognised the sympathy of the movement, and explained tremblingly: "My son, I am waiting for a message of life or death "-he faltered, seized his hand, adding, "and I'm afraid to see it!"