“We have not forgotten you here at The Towers,” wrote Miss Hetty. “The mistletoe is still green, and so is your memory. I see that the Government is counting greatly on its Western ranches for war supplies, and I envy you your chance to help.” That was nice of Miss Carter to write her. But my, how far away school seemed now! She could think only of the spring roundup, and the cattle to be shipped from Los Ranchos. Anne’s letter, however, read aloud to Mom, roused vivid and affectionate memories. Anne loved the Indian necklace, and the mistletoe, “which furnished kisses to lots of parting sweethearts at a big party we gave here New Year’s Night. Did you get the books, darlin’, and the other things? The etching was from Barry, you know. He sailed last week.” “Didn’t you answer Anne’s letter yet, honey?” Mrs. Daniels looked up in reproof. “Of course I did, Mother, the next week. Tooth took it in for me.” Georgie had risen stealthily and was creeping from the room. Raquel overtook him at a stride, caught his woolly collar, and from the crumby recesses of an inner pocket of his sheepskin jacket drew forth her six weeks’ old letter to Anne. She cuffed him, and returned to Anne’s letter, feeling a strange disappointment that Barry should have gone overseas without having had her thanks, without having read her letter to the family at least, for she had been too shy, too “provincial,” Lois would have said, to thank Barry herself. “The girls at school write,” Anne concluded her letter, “that no one has heard a word from Lois Wainwright since the first few post cards she sent from El Paso. I wonder where she is and why she doesn’t write. I understand that Miss Carter has suggested to your Jimmy that if Lois’ father does not recover she return to school where she can be among old friends. Mr. Wainwright’s lawyers in Boston haven’t even heard from him, and have no idea where he is, as he had said he might go to California, or to the Orient. Did you know that they were in El Paso for some time after you returned home?” Raquel sat motionless. She felt vaguely covered with a sense of great wrongdoing. Just what it was she did not at first seem to see clearly. Oh, yes, she should have told Jimmy, for then he would have found out where Lois and her father were; he could have seen them while he was stationed so near El Paso. He had been only a few miles away all the time! Never before in her life had Raquel suffered such a sense of sick shame as came to her then. Once, when she was eight years old, she had stood by and watched her pet coon suck a dozen of Mom’s imported white leghorn eggs, which she had put under a setting hen the day before. Raquel felt now somewhat as she had after that performance. Russell was standing in the door waiting for Raquel to look up from the letter at which she had been staring for so long. “Could I speak to you a moment, alone?” He jerked his head towards the store room.