She had been there barely forty-eight hours when there arrived from the Philippines a bulky letter from Lieutenant Sandy Ray, eldest son and hope and heir, dated "Camp Lawton, Benguet." It had been nearly three months on the way. It brought tidings that made his mother's soft cheek pale with anxiety and caused Colonel Ray to look up startled as he read it, to go over and take his wife in his arms, lead her to the sofa, and hold her close as he went on with the final pages--a boy's rhapsody over a boy's first love: MY OWN MUMMIE:--Not until I could send you the inclosed, the portrait, and by no means flattering one, of the loveliest girl that ever lived, could I write to tell you of my almost delirious happiness. But _look_ at her--_look_ at her, and see for yourself and rejoice with me, best, blessedest, dearest of mothers, that this exquisite creature loves me--_me_, your no 'count, ranch boy Sandy--loves _me_, and will soon, please God, be my own wife. Mother, mother, I have hardly slept in my wild joy, and now I can hardly wait for your approval and blessing. Dad will love and admire her, I know, but mothers, they say, never think any woman good enough for their boys, while I--I could kiss the very ground she treads so lightly. I almost worship the very glove she left me for a souvenir. As yet I can't quite realize my wondrous luck. Why, Mummie, the other fellows were simply mad about her during her brief stay at Manila. Quite a lot of us, you know, were ordered there when poor Jack Bender was court-martialed. He got a stay of proceedings of some kind, so while the witnesses should have been back with General Young here, they were dancing attendance on her, and the way I got the inside track was, when her parents had to go over to Japan, I coaxed a ten days' leave out of the General and went with them--her father, mother and her own sweet self--on the _Hancock_ to Nagasaki, and came back desolate on the--I don't know what. I met her at a dance at the Club. She attracted me the instant I set eyes on her, so like is she to Maidie, only darker, perhaps, and taller, and a bit more slender. But her eyes, hair, teeth, coloring, are all so like Maidie's. Her features, perhaps, are more regular. Shannon, of the Twenty-third, was doing the devoted, and he presented me. She danced like a sylph, she danced right into my heart, Mummie, and there she lives and reigns and has her being--my queen! my queen!