"Bless your dear old heart!" exclaimed the little lady, springing to her feet, facing him with indomitable smiles and thrusting forward two slender, white, bejeweled hands. "No--don't say you disapprove! Don't scold! Don't do anything but sit right down here and have a cup of your own delicious tea--(Frank, some boiling water)--that no one makes for you as I do--you've owned it many a time. And then we're all going in to the Palace for dinner and then to the theatre, and I'll tell you all about it between the courses or between the acts. Oh, you poor dear! I ought to have come before--you've been working yourself to death!" And by this time, resolutely pulling, she had towed the General to a chair, and into this, his favorite leather-armed, canvas-backed, hickory-framed companion of many a year, she deftly dropped him and then, giving him no chance for a word, gayly pirouetting, she seized one after another upon each member of the party present--an accomplished little mistress of ceremonies encased in a tailor-made traveling suit that rendered her proof against a dozen minor ills, so beautifully was it cut and fitted to her pretty figure--and, with inexhaustible flow of merry words, presented her or him to the veteran in the chair: "This, my honored General, first and foremost, is Miss Mildred Prime, daughter of a thousand earls is she, yet one _vastly_ to be desired, though I say it who should not, for she hails from New York, which is enough to make me hate her, whereas we've just sworn an eternal friendship. You've only casually met her and her folks before, but _I_ can tell you all about them. You should have put Frank at the head of your Intelligence Bureau, General. _He'd_ never find out anything, but _I_ would. We came on the same train together all the way from Ogden." A tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired, oval-faced girl, coloring slightly in evident embarassment over these odd army ways, courtesied smilingly to the General and seemed to be pleading dumbly for clemency if there had been transgression.