"I don't see why not, if I first ask her to erase the writing. Now, my dear boy, I have you at my mercy. You're on your way back to the fort; I will accompany the ladies back to New York, and----" "Aha! You will, will you?" exclaimed the younger man, with a soldier's instinctive delight at getting an enemy at a disadvantage. "I'm going back to New York with them myself. I've been ordered back, on duty." "Hem! For how long, may I ask?" "Well, as you can learn by inquiry at the Department, I may as well tell you that it will be for a week, at the least." "Suppose, then," said the Admiral, after a moment of thought, "that we agree upon an armistice. You go to New York; so shall I. I shan't annoy you in your special business--never fear--and I'll give you a full week in which to make up your mind, but if by that time you haven't procured those sketches I shall charge myself with the getting of them, no matter how much begging and arguing may be required. Is it agreed?" "I suppose it must be," said Jermyn. "You well know that I couldn't willingly deprive you of the chance to make fifty thousand dollars, after all you have done for me, you great-hearted old rascal!" "Not even if I were to give the money to your wife?" said the Admiral, with a world of shrewdness in the sidelong look with which he regarded his companion. "You know very well that I wouldn't allow you to do such a thing!" replied Jermyn angrily. "Hurrah!" shouted the Admiral. By that time the luncheon was ready, and the Admiral made himself delightfully companionable to the ladies, but Jermyn was so silent and abstracted that even Kate rallied him, asking him if the New York duties which the War Department had imposed, compelled such hard thinking? Jermyn replied that they weren't, but that the Admiral had just given him the most provoking lot of orders that one man ever received from another, so both ladies insisted at once upon knowing what the orders were, and both men maintained silence to a degree that was simply maddening, so Kate quizzed Jermyn privately, and he told her, privately, that she mustn't say another word about it. Kate afterward told Trif, in confidence, that she must have been right in supposing that the business upon which the two men had gone North, a few days before, must have been of great importance to the Government, as well as of an extremely secret nature; but that, nevertheless, it was a burning shame that older officers had such despotic control of their juniors, and that if women had charge of government affairs, there would not be any of such manifest injustice.