“WORMLEY’s hotel, Washington, April 7, 188-.

“Dear miss Anderson,—­I have been acting on your parting advice to look out for that Mr. Lafflin of mine, and I have discovered that he is an unmitigated scamp.  Consequently there is nothing more to keep me in Washington, and I should now like your advice about coming to Fortress Monroe.  Do you find it malarial?  On the boat your aunt asked me to come, but you said nothing about it, and I was left to suppose that you did not think it would agree with me.  Do you still think so? or what do you think?  I know you think it was uncalled for and in extremely bad taste for me to tell you what I did the other day; and I have thought so too.  There is only one thing that could justify it—­that is, I think it might justify it—­if you thought so.  But I do not feel sure that you would like to know it, or, if you knew it, would like it.  I’ve been rather slow coming to the conclusion myself, and perhaps it’s only the beginning of the end; and not the conclusion—­if there is such a difference.  But the question now is whether I may come and tell you what I think it is—­justify myself, or make things worse than they are now.  I don’t know that they can be worse, but I think I should like to try.  I think your presence would inspire me.

“Washington is a wilderness since Miss—­Van Hook left.  It is not a howling wilderness simply because it has not enough left in it to howl; but it has all the other merits of a wilderness.

“Yours sincerely,
“D.  F. Mavering.”

After a second perusal of this note, Miss Anderson recurred to the other letter which she had neglected for it, and read it with eyes from which the tears slowly fell upon it.  Then she sat a long time at her table with both letters before her, and did not move, except to take her handkerchief out of her pocket and dry her eyes, from which the tears began at once to drip again.  At last she started forward, and caught pen and paper toward her, biting her lip and frowning as if to keep herself firm, and she said to the central figure in the photograph case which stood at the back of the table, “I will, I will!  You are a man, anyway.”

She sat down, and by a series of impulses she wrote a letter, with which she gave herself no pause till she put it in the clerk’s hands, to whom she ran downstairs with it, kicking her skirt into wild whirls as she ran, and catching her foot in it and stumbling.

“Will it go—­go to-night?” she demanded tragically.

“Just in time,” said the clerk, without looking up, and apparently not thinking that her tone betrayed any unusual amount of emotion in a lady posting a letter; he was used to intensity on such occasions.

The letter ran—­

“Dear Mr. Mavering,—­We shall now be here so short a time that I do not think it advisable for you to come.

“Your letter was rather enigmatical, and I do not know whether I understood it exactly.  I suppose you told me what you did for good reasons of your own, and I did not think much about it.  I believe the question of taste did not come up in my mind.