“Then let us send a message to Mr. Winton,” she suggested, playing the part of the capricious _ingenue_ to the very upcast of a pair of mischievous eyes. “I'll write it and you may sign it.” Adams stretched his complaisance the necessary additional inch and gave her a pencil and a pad of blanks. She wrote rapidly: “Miss Carteret has been here admiring your drawings. She took one of them away with her, and I couldn't stop her without being rude. You shouldn't have done it without asking her permission. She says--” “Oh, dear! I am making it awfully long. Does it cost so much a word?” “No,” said Adams, not without an effort. He was beginning to be distinctly disappointed in Miss Virginia, and was inwardly wondering what piece of girlish frivolity he was expected to sign and send to his chief. Meanwhile she went on writing: “--I am to tell you not to get into any fresh trouble--not to let anyone else get you into trouble; by which I infer she means that some attempt will be made to keep you from returning on the evening train.” “There, can you send all that?” she asked sweetly, giving the pad to her host. Adams read the first part of the letter length telegram with inward groanings, but the generous purpose of it struck him like a whip-blow when he came to the thinly-veiled warning. Also it shamed him for his unworthy judgment of Virginia. “I thank you very heartily, Miss Carteret,” he said humbly. “It shall be sent word for word.” Then, for the Reverend William's benefit: “Winton deserves all sorts of a snubbing for taking liberties with your portrait. I'll see he gets more when he comes back.” Here the matter rested; and, having done what she conceived to be her charitable duty, Virginia was as anxious to get away as heart--the heart of a slightly bored Reverend Billy, for instance--could wish. So they bade Adams good-by and picked their way down the frozen embankment and across the ice-bridge; down and across and back to the Rosemary, where they found a perturbed chaperon in a flutter of solicitude arising upon their mysterious disappearance and long absence. “It may be just as well not to tell any of them where we have been,” said Virginia in an aside to her cousin. And so the incident of tea-drinking in the enemy's camp was safely put away like a little personal note in its envelop with the flap gummed down. VI. THE RAJAH GIVES AN ORDER While Adams was dispensing commissary tea in iron-stone china cups to his two guests in the “dinkey” field office, his chief, taking the Rosemary's night run in reverse in the company of Town-Marshal Biggin, was turning the Rajah's coup into a small Utah profit.