cave.  I was their prisoner, too, which complicated matters.  But we had such a bully time that they asked me to join them.  I told them I’d like the life in some respects.  I could see it was a sort of game not unlike some I’d played when I was a boy.  But it would have made me nervous, so I had to refuse them.

“Well, I’m talking nonsense.  What if you should think I counted it sense!  That would be bad for me.  I only thought you’d be having so may pious and proper letters that I’d have to give you a jog if I got you to answer this.  And I do wish you would answer it.  I’m a lonely man, though a busy one.  Of course it’s going to be a tremendous comfort having Honora here when once she gets to be herself.  She’s wild with pain now, and nothing she says means anything.  We play chess a good deal, after a fashion.  Honora thinks she’s amusing me, but as I like ‘the rigor of the game,’ I can’t say that I’m amused at her plays.  The first time she thinks before she moves I’ll know she’s over the worst of her trouble.  She seems very weak, but I’m feeding her on cream and eggs.  The kiddies are dears—­just as cute as young owls.  They’re not afraid of me even when I pretend I’m a coyote and howl.

“Do write to me, Miss Barrington.  I’m as crude as a cabbage, but when I say I’d rather have you write me than have any piece of good fortune befall me which your wildest imagination could depict, I mean it.  Perhaps that will scare you off.  Anyway, you can’t say I didn’t play fair.

“I’m worn out sitting around with this fractured leg of mine in its miserable cast. (I know stronger words than ‘miserable,’ but I use it because I’m determined to behave myself.) Honora says she thinks it would be all right for you to correspond with me.  I asked her.

     “Yours faithfully,

     “KARL WANDER.”

“What a ridiculous boy,” said Kate to herself.  She laughed aloud with a rippling merriment; and then, after a little silence, she laughed again.

“The man certainly is naif,” she said.  “Can he really expect me to answer a letter like that?”

She awoke several times that night, and each time she gave a fleeting thought to the letter.  She seemed to see it before her eyes—­a purple eidolon, a parallelogram in shape.  It flickered up and down like an electric sign.  When morning came she was quite surprised to find the letter was existent and stationary.  She read it again, and she wished tremendously that she might answer it.  It occurred to her that in a way she never had had any fun.  She had been persistently earnest, passionately honest, absurdly grim.  Now to answer that letter would come under the head of mere frolic!  Yet would it?  Was not this curious, outspoken man—­this gigantic, good-hearted, absurd boy—­giving her notice that he was ready to turn into her lover at the slightest gesture of acquiescence on her part?  No, the frolic would soon end.  It would be another of those appalling games-for-life, those woman-trap affairs.  And she liked freedom better than anything.