Anita rose and walked back home through the icy mist. Mrs. Fortescue was in the shaded drawing-room seated at her harp, playing soft chords and arpeggios, with Colonel Fortescue leaning over her chair. If was a picture Anita had often seen, and at those times, from her childhood and from Beverley's, they were made to feel that they were secondary, and even the After-Clap was superfluous. Nevertheless, Anita walked into the room. The Colonel and Mrs. Fortescue started apart like young lovers. "I have been to see Mrs. Lawrence," said Anita, "and she asked me if I would write a letter for her. She didn't, of course, tell me not to say anything about it to you, mother and daddy, but I would rather not tell you to whom the letter is to be written. You must trust me, my own dear daddy. It is a very simple letter, just to say that Lawrence has disappeared and Mrs. Lawrence and the little boy are in kind hands." "Of course we trust you," answered Colonel Fortescue, smiling. "You are a very trusty person, Anita." "Like my father and mother," answered Anita, and ran out of the room. As they heard her light step tripping up the stairs, the father and mother looked at each other with troubled eyes. "It is to Broussard," said the Colonel, remembering his last interview with him. "I think Broussard steadily befriended Lawrence and his wife." Mrs. Fortescue's candid eyes grew clouded. "It is a strange intimacy," she said. "It's all right," unhesitatingly replied the Colonel. "Oh, well," said Mrs. Fortescue, touching the harpstrings, "If you are fomenting a love affair between Anita at Fort Blizzard and Broussard in the tropics, it is your affair." "Elizabeth," said the Colonel, "I am not a person to foment love affairs, or any other private and personal affairs." "I said _if_ you were fomenting a love affair, John," replied Mrs. Fortescue; and then there was no more music from the harp, the Colonel going into his office and Mrs. Fortescue to the After-Clap's nursery. In her own little room Anita was already hard at work on her letter to Broussard. It was a very short and simple letter, telling exactly, and only, what Mrs. Lawrence had asked, and it was signed "Sincerely Yours." But when it was to be sealed Anita's insurgent heart cried out to be heard, and she added a little postscript, which read: "Gamechick is very well and sends his love. I ride him nearly every day." Anita would not trust her precious letter to the mail orderly, or even Sergeant McGillicuddy or Kettle, but throwing her crimson mantle around her, she slipped out, in the cold mist, to the letter box. For one moment she held the letter poised in her hand before it took its flight toward the tropics; Anita's tender heart went with the letter.