Most unexpectedly Mills was heard murmuring a question which seemed to me very odd.

“I wonder how your mother addressed that note?”

A moment of silence ensued.

“Hardly in the newspaper style, I should think,” retorted Mr. Blunt, with one of his grins that made me doubt the stability of his feelings and the consistency of his outlook in regard to his whole tale.  “My mother’s maid took it in a fiacre very late one evening to the Pavilion and brought an answer scrawled on a scrap of paper:  ‘Write your messages at once’ and signed with a big capital R. So my mother sat down again to her charming writing desk and the maid made another journey in a fiacre just before midnight; and ten days later or so I got a letter thrust into my hand at the avanzadas just as I was about to start on a night patrol, together with a note asking me to call on the writer so that she might allay my mother’s anxieties by telling her how I looked.

“It was signed R only, but I guessed at once and nearly fell off my horse with surprise.”

“You mean to say that Dona Rita was actually at the Royal Headquarters lately?” exclaimed Mills, with evident surprise.  “Why, we—­everybody—­thought that all this affair was over and done with.”

“Absolutely.  Nothing in the world could be more done with than that episode.  Of course the rooms in the hotel at Tolosa were retained for her by an order from Royal Headquarters.  Two garret-rooms, the place was so full of all sorts of court people; but I can assure you that for the three days she was there she never put her head outside the door.  General Mongroviejo called on her officially from the King.  A general, not anybody of the household, you see.  That’s a distinct shade of the present relation.  He stayed just five minutes.  Some personage from the Foreign department at Headquarters was closeted for about a couple of hours.  That was of course business.  Then two officers from the staff came together with some explanations or instructions to her.  Then Baron H., a fellow with a pretty wife, who had made so many sacrifices for the cause, raised a great to-do about seeing her and she consented to receive him for a moment.  They say he was very much frightened by her arrival, but after the interview went away all smiles.  Who else?  Yes, the Archbishop came.  Half an hour.  This is more than is necessary to give a blessing, and I can’t conceive what else he had to give her.  But I am sure he got something out of her.  Two peasants from the upper valley were sent for by military authorities and she saw them, too.  That friar who hangs about the court has been in and out several times.  Well, and lastly, I myself.  I got leave from the outposts.  That was the first time I talked to her.  I would have gone that evening back to the regiment, but the friar met me in the corridor and informed me that I would be ordered to escort that most loyal and noble lady back to the French