Mrs. Fortescue took Anita in her lap, as if the girl were indeed the age of the After-Clap.

“Do what you like, dear child,” she said.  “Girls like you can do some things that women can’t, because you have the enormous advantage of not knowing anything.”

CHAPTER VI

SOME LETTERS AND KETTLE’S ENLISTMENT

Anita, who could plan things quite as well as if she were forty instead of eighteen, bided her time until the hour when Mrs. McGillicuddy was putting the After-Clap to bed.  Then the girl slipped away and took the road to the long street of the married men’s quarters.  An icy fog swept from the Arctic Circle, enveloped the world, hiding both moon and stars, and made the great arc lamps look like little points of light in the great ocean of white mist.  Every step of the way Anita’s heart and will battled fiercely together.  Broussard knew Mrs. Lawrence in some mysterious way.  Perhaps he had loved her once; Anita was all a woman, and at seventeen was learned in the affairs of the heart.

This woman, however, between whom and Broussard some strong link was forged, Anita knew not when, nor how, nor where, was ill and poor and suffering, and Anita’s natural inclinations were merciful.  Besides, she had been taught by her father and mother the great lessons of life in kindness and tenderness.  She had seen her father give up a party of pleasure to walk behind the pine coffin of a private soldier, and her mother had robbed her greenhouse of its choicest blossoms to lay a wreath on a soldier’s grave.

By instinct, rather than sight, Anita stopped in front of the right door and met the chaplain coming out.

“Glad to see you, Anita,” said the chaplain, who was muffled up to his eyes.  “Go in and talk to that poor lady.  We all want to help her, but we find it hard, for she will tell nothing of herself, of her family, or anything, except that she knows Lawrence didn’t mean to desert, and will yet report himself.”

In the plain little bedroom Mrs. Lawrence lay on her bed, the shaded electric light by her bedside showing her thin face, made more pallid by the great braids of lustrous black hair that fell about her.  A look of faint surprise came into her languid eyes as Anita drew a chair to her bed and took her hand.

“My mother sent me,” Anita said, gently, “to ask if I could do anything for you.”

Mrs. Lawrence murmured her thanks, and then hesitated for a moment, the words trembling upon her lips.

“Yes,” she said, “you can do something for me.  Something I haven’t asked anybody to do.  I tried to ask the chaplain just now—­he is a kind man, and tries to help me but for some reason my courage failed; I don’t know why, but I didn’t ask him.  It is, to write a letter for me.”

“Certainly I will write a letter for you,” said Anita.

“It is to Mr. Broussard,” answered Mrs. Lawrence.