She took the letter that lay uppermost to her hand. It was dated Saltwoods. Written here—at this very desk, no doubt. Perhaps with this very ivory penholder, fluted, yellow, stained, while he sat in this same Windsor chair.... Unconsciously she caressed the worn wooden arms whereon his arms must have rested. Then again she set herself to read:— "Saltwoods, 19th April." On that April 19, all those years ago, he was thinking of her, writing to her! And she—so many miles away, shut in by the dreariest prison walls fate had ever built round a young impatient soul—had then not the faintest hint of her deliverer’s approach. DEAR MISS TEMPEST,—I dare say you have quite forgotten me. I was the youngest griffin, just before the old Colonel’s death. I hope you will not think it a great impertinence in me to write like this to you; but my leave is up in a week or so, and I don’t like to leave England without having seen your father’s daughter again. I can never forget how kind he was to me—and your mother too. It made all the difference to me; such a young fool as I was, and so new to India and everything. I find I know some of the fellows at Fort Monkton, and I’m going to stop there a few days. May I call—and if so, when? Yours sincerely, HARRY ENGLISH. P.S.—I’ve only just found out where you are. To Rosamond—most unwilling inmate in a household where, if she was not actually a burden, the smallness of her pittance rendered her certainly no material gain—this letter had brought a sort of vision of the past, a gleam of bygone light which made the present even more intolerable by contrast. It had been something to her to think that she should meet some one at last belonging to her old life, some one who had known her in those glamorous years of her happiness, some one straight from the magic shores that had held her in her happy years. From eight to sixteen had Rosamond Tempest spent her life between the little hill station, the refuge of their hot season, and the historic old northern town where her father’s duty lay—a sort of little Princess Royal, with a hundred devoted slaves and a score of gallant young courtiers, the imperious favourite of the whole station, native and white alike.... Oh the rides in the dawn! oh the picnics by moonlight! the many-coloured, vivid days that went with such swing, where every man almost was a hero, where the very air seemed full of the romance of frontier fights, of raids, and big game hunts, of "Tiger, tiger, burning bright" in jungle haunts! ... It had been surely the cruellest stroke of fate that had thrust the little spoilt girl, the beloved only child, from this pinnacle of bliss and importance! Between one day and another Rosamond had become the penniless orphan, whom nobody wanted ... whom it was so kind of Major and Mrs. Carter to escort back to England, whom it was almost superhumanly good of Uncle and Aunt Baynes to admit into their family.