Truesdale, readily figured himself the reverse of _persona grata_ to the Beldens, and stayed away; but this did not prevent his reception of advices more or less regular from the heart of the Belden household. "What's that absurd girl up to _this_ time?" he asked one morning, as an envelope, directed in a hand already too familiar, came to the door. He recognized readily enough the sprawling, half-masculine penmanship of Gladys McKenna, as readily as he divined the rôle which she must imagine herself to be playing. She was pretending herself to be a prisoner in some hostile camp--a hostage in some dismal dungeon; and, despite the close and suspicious watchfulness of those surrounding her, she was still sending her little messages, all the same, to her _preux chevalier_ on the opposing side. In the end her reward would come; she and her knight.... "Ouf!" cried Truesdale, who scented all this crass and forward romanticism between the trivial lines of her communications; "why does she write, when she hasn't got anything to say?" Sometimes she _did_ have something to say--a little. To her statements of the disposition of the Belden family towards her correspondent, and to her general recommendation to "beware," would be tagged indications of her own individual movements. "Poor auntie is laid up with the neuralgia, and Ethel has gone visiting in Kenwood, so I am the only one to be sent to Field's for those gloves. Auntie says the best time for the glove counter is about twelve-thirty, when the crowd is smallest."--"Yes," mumbled Truesdale, irritably; "and lunch at one." Or: "They are going to let me go alone to Modjeska tomorrow afternoon--in the street-car; just think of it! I think I shall ask for a seat in the last row--I am so timid about fires." Sometimes she would add "destroy this," or, "burn this." "Most willingly!" Truesdale would exclaim, and throw "this" in the fire at once. Or, again "Imagine; I am to have a tooth filled. Auntie says I needn't trouble to go away down-town--there is a very good man right on Twenty-second Street. 'Go early,' she says; 'and try to be over with it by eleven, so that you can enjoy your lunch.' Did you ever know of such thoughtfulness?" "No, I never did," acknowledged Truesdale, grimly. By these and other such subterfuges did Gladys keep her epistolary hand in, until the time came when she really had something of consequence to communicate. Once or twice she also regaled him with the comments of the Beldens on the building projects of the Marshalls. Truesdale had the same tepid interest for these advices as for her other notes and comments. He did not consider himself as particularly concerned. At best he was but a bird of passage. And it seemed to him a sad error to load one's self down with so dense and stationary a thing as a house.