And stacks of letters and some few papers and magazines--by no manner of means all that were hopefully started--had come to the Archers and Mrs. Stannard and the exiles of official Almy, and stacks of letters were there for the slowly bettering young soldier lying helpless under the commander's roof, faithfully tended and devotedly nursed, the object of the fondest hope and love and prayer--Lieutenant Harold Willett, on detached service from "the Lost and Strayed," as aide-de-camp to the commanding general, Department of Arizona, who never yet since the day he left Vancouver Barracks had set eyes on him. Most of these letters, tied in tape, stood piled like bricks upon the mantel-shelf in the darkened quarters. Some few of them, in feminine superscription and bearing the Portland postmark, Dr. Bentley had seen fit to segregate and set aside. They had been placed for safe keeping in the hands of Mrs. Stannard, of whom, said Bentley, "there are not ten women of her sense in the whole service," which, said Lieutenant Blake, of Camp McDowell, when told of the fact, "is a most egregious exaggeration," and no woman there knew just what he meant. Blake at the moment was riding boot to boot with his captain, Freeman, for between the two there dwelt an attachment and understanding rarely seen between captain and subaltern, but Freeman guffawed at his junior's whimsical remark, and told it, just to try the effect on three of the four heroines then quartered at the camp. No one of their number was there who did not envy Mrs. Stannard her place in public estimation, but no one of them, could they have known, would have envied her the plight in which she found herself--joint custodian, with Bentley, of Hal Willett's unconscious confidences--compelled to see a young girl's rapturous love lavished upon a man so saturated with the incense of feminine idolatry as to be more than apt to underrate the priceless boon of a pure woman's heart-whole devotion.