“Hush, hush!” her mother smiled. “Don't make so much noise.” “I should like to know who's to be the drudge in Paul's privileged family. It doesn't strike me it's going to be Moya. And Paul only drudges for people he doesn't know.” “Moya is a girl you can expect anything of. She is a wonderful mixture of opposites. She has the Irish quickness, and yet she has learned to obey. She has had the freedom and the discipline of these little lordly army posts. She is one of the few girls of her age who does not measure everything from her own point of view.” “Is that a dig at me, ma'am?” At that moment Moya came out upon the porch. She was very striking with the high color and brilliant eyes that mail-time fever breeds. Christine looked at her with freshly aroused curiosity, moved by her mother's unwonted burst of praise. The faintest tinge of jealousy made her feel naughty. As Moya went down the board walk, the colonel's orderly came springing up the steps to meet her with the mail-bag. He saluted and turned off at an angle down the embankment not to present his back to the ladies. “Did you see that! He never raised his eyes. They are like priests. You can't make them look at you.” Moya looked at Christine in amazement. The man himself might have heard her. It was not the first time this privileged guest had rubbed against garrison customs in certain directions hardly worth mentioning. Moya hesitated. Then she laughed a little, and said: “Only a raw recruity would look at an officer's daughter, or any lady of the line.” “Oh, you horrid little aristocrat! Well, I look at them, when they are as pretty as that one, and I forgive them if they look at me.” Moya turned and hovered over the contents of the mail-bag. In the exercise of one of her prerogatives, it was her habit to sort its contents before delivering it at the official door. “All, all for you!” she offered a huge packet of letters, smiling, to Mrs. Bogardus. It was faced with one on top in Paul's handwriting. “All but one,” she added, and proceeded to open her own much fatter one in the same hand. She stood reading it in the hall. Mrs. Bogardus presently followed and remained beside her. “Could I speak to your father a moment?” she asked. “Certainly, I will call him,” said Moya. “Wait: I hear him now.” The study door opened and Colonel Middleton joined them. Mrs. Bogardus leading the way into the sitting-room, the colonel followed her, and Moya, not having been invited, lingered in the hall. “Well, have the hunters started yet?” the colonel inquired in his breezy voice, which made you want to open the doors and windows to give it room. “Be seated! Be seated! I hope you have got a long letter to read me.” Mrs. Bogardus stood reflecting. “The day this letter was mailed they got off--only two days ago,” she said. “Could I reach them, Colonel, with a telegram?”