"Well, I got my billet, and I am on the way out, and on the same boat is a brown-faced wiry little doctor who is bound for the same spot. He is returning there after a furlough. I asked him if he was kept busy; but he tells me he has a tremendous round, and only stays there for three months in the year. 'A loathsome hole,' he terms it. There is not a single European woman in the station, and the few men are a motley crew with a great propensity for hard drinking. He looked me up and down this morning, and remarked as he walked away: 'The body and soul of a man goes to pieces there in a twelvemonth, and it's a race between them. I give you an extra six months, for you're extra fit.' This is a cheerful outlook. "Do you think I'll fulfil his prediction? I am selfishly telling you this, for I don't want you to snap our chain of friendship. It is a slight one, I own, but if it is only a silken thread and you hold fast, I'll have grit and hope to pull along and fight my environment. It won't be severed at my end, I promise you. Tell me of your doings. Do you still instruct Chuckles on Sunday afternoons in the art of building? I should like to be instructed too. Give me a tip on the subject, if you will. We are all building something, are we not? And my buildings, as I told Chuckles before I left, have collapsed so disastrously that I am the more wary in the beginning of another. "Well, what else can I tell you? The gossip of board ship will not interest you. Our outlook is sea and sky at present. The feeling of infinite space on all sides is a depressing one to me—I don't know why. Write to me soon. You promised to answer me; and I look and wait anxiously for the letter that is not yet begun. "Yours most sincerely, "RANDOLPH NEVILLE." Sidney read this in the privacy of her bedroom. She sat for a long while with it on her knee, for the personality of the writer possessed her; and then she wrote a reply: "DEAR MR. NEVILLE, "Thank you for your letter. I have not forgotten you, and have often wondered how you are getting on. I shall not let my end of the chain slip, I assure you, for friends like yourself are few and far between. You seemed, when amongst us, to find a niche for yourself, and fit into it so comfortably that now the emptiness of that niche is ever before us. My father says no one here understands the political world as you do, and he misses your company.