"It is one of the last things we let patients do," she said, "though it is the thing they all want to do first. There is nothing so tiring as letter writing." "I'm not going to write a letter," Anne replied, "just a hail to a fellow sufferer. Only I'm no sufferer, and I'm afraid he is." She wrote her note, and it was presently handed to Jordan King. He had wondered very much what sort of answer he should have, feeling that nothing could reveal the sort of person this girl was so surely as a letter, no matter how short. He had been sure he recognized education in her speech, breeding in her manner, high intelligence as well as beauty in her face, but--well, the letter would reveal. And so it did, though it was written in a rather shaky hand, in pencil, on one of Miss Arden's hospital record blanks--of all things! DEAR MR. KING: It is the most wonderful thing in the world to be sitting up far enough to be able to write and tell you how sorry I am that you are lying down. But Mrs. Burns assures me that you are fast improving and that soon you will be about again. Meanwhile you are turning your time of waiting to a glorious account in teaching poor Franz to speak English. Surely he must have been longing to speak it, so that he might tell you the things in his heart--about that dreadful night. But I know you don't want me to write of that, and I won't. Of course I should care to have him play for me, and I hope he may do it soon--to-morrow, perhaps. I wonder if he knows the Schubert "_Fruehlingstraum_"--how I should love to hear it! As for your interesting plan for relieving the passing hours, I should hardly be human if I did not respond to it! Only please never write when you don't feel quite like it--and neither will I. The white lilacs were even more beautiful than the roses and the daffodils. There was a long row of white lilac trees at one side of a garden I used to play in--I shall never, never forget what that fragrance was like after a rain! And now that my sun is shining again--after the rain--you may imagine what those white lilacs breathe of to me. With the best of good wishes, ANNE LINTON. Jordan King read this note through three times before he folded it back into its original creases. Then he shut it away in a leather-bound writing tablet which lay by his side. "Franz," he said, addressing the youth who was at this hour of the day his sole attendant, "can you play Schubert's '_Fruehlingstraum_'?" He had to repeat this title several times, with varying accents, before he succeeded in making it intelligible. But suddenly Franz leaped to an understanding. "Yess--yess--yess--yess--sair," he responded joyously, and made a dive for his violin case.