not coming except that he declines my invitation.  It is very silly in him, and I regard it as no reason at all.  I am quite unused to being declined and do not intend to acquire the habit until I am a good deal older than I was my last birthday.  Still, I can understand that he is too big to force against his will, so I think the kindest way to break the back of the opposition will be for me to do it personally.  As an over-ruler I nearly always succeed.  All I require is an opportunity.

Please lay the two halves of your brain evenly together and devise a train and an interview for me.  Of course you will meet me at the train and leave me at the interview.  These are the fundamental rules of my game.  I know that you are clever and before we have left the station you will know that I am.  As arch-conspirators we shall surely win out together, won’t we?

Yours very truly,

Bertha Rosscott.

This missive posted, Jack’s good angel made herself patient until the afternoon of the next day when she might and did expect an answer.

She was not disappointed.  The letter came and it was pleasantly bulky and appeared ample enough to have contained an indexed gun powder plot.  She was so sure that Mitchell had been fully equal to the occasion that she tore the envelope open with a smile—­and read: 

      MY DEAR MRS. ROSSCOTT: 

      To think of my having some of your handwriting for my own!—­I
      was nearly petrified with joy.

You see I know your writing from having read Burnett all those “Burn this at once” epistles.  And I know it still better from having to catalogue them for his ready reference.  You know how impatient he is. (But I have run into an open switch and must digress backwards.)

I shall preserve your letter till I die.  In war I shall wear it carefully spread all over wherever I may be killed, and in peace I intend to keep my place in my Bible with it.  Could words say more! (Being backed up again, I will now begin.)

I was not at all surprised at your writing me.  If you had known me it would have been different.  But where ignorance is bliss any woman but yourself is always liable to pitch in with a pen, and you see you are not yourself but only “any woman” to me as yet.  Besides, women have written to me before you.  My mother does so regularly.  She encloses a postal card and all I have to do is to mail it and there she is answered.  It’s a great scheme which I proudly invented when I first went away to school and I recommend it to you if you—­if you ever have a mother.

How my ink does run away with me!  Let me refer to your esteemed favor again!  Ah! we have worked down to the bed-rock, or—­in Hugh Miller’s colloquial phrasing—­to the “old red sandstone,” of the fact that you want Jack.  You state the fact with what you designate as brutal candor—­and