It was talked about from a royalist point of view with a kind of respect. It was even said that the inspiration and the resolution of the war going on now over the Pyrenees had come out from that head. . . Some of them talked as if she were the guardian angel of Legitimacy. You know what royalist gush is like.” Mr. Blunt’s face expressed sarcastic disgust. Mills moved his head the least little bit. Apparently he knew. “Well, speaking with all possible respect, it seems to have affected my mother’s brain. I was already with the royal army and of course there could be no question of regular postal communications with France. My mother hears or overhears somewhere that the heiress of Mr. Allègre is contemplating a secret journey. All the noble Salons were full of chatter about that secret naturally. So she sits down and pens an autograph: ‘Madame, Informed that you are proceeding to the place on which the hopes of all the right thinking people are fixed, I trust to your womanly sympathy with a mother’s anxious feelings, etc., etc.,’ and ending with a request to take messages to me and bring news of me. . . The coolness of my mother!” Most unexpectedly Mills was heard murmuring a question which seemed to me very odd. “I wonder how your mother addressed that note?” A moment of silence ensued. “Hardly in the newspaper style, I should think,” retorted Mr. Blunt, with one of his grins that made me doubt the stability of his feelings and the consistency of his outlook in regard to his whole tale. “My mother’s maid took it in a fiacre very late one evening to the Pavilion and brought an answer scrawled on a scrap of paper: ‘Write your messages at once’ and signed with a big capital R. So my mother sat down again to her charming writing desk and the maid made another journey in a fiacre just before midnight; and ten days later or so I got a letter thrust into my hand at the _avanzadas_ just as I was about to start on a night patrol, together with a note asking me to call on the writer so that she might allay my mother’s anxieties by telling her how I looked. “It was signed R only, but I guessed at once and nearly fell off my horse with surprise.” “You mean to say that Doña Rita was actually at the Royal Headquarters lately?” exclaimed Mills, with evident surprise. “Why, we—everybody—thought that all this affair was over and done with.”