HE was at home now, waiting impatiently for the General’s answer to his letter. Two weeks had passed and he had not received it. But she had explained in her letters that her father had returned the day he left, had a talk with McLeod, and left on important business. They were expecting his return at any moment.

It was a new revelation of life he found in their first love letters. He never knew that he could write before. He sat for hours at his desk in his law office and poured out to her his dreams, hopes and ambitions. All the poetry of youth, and the passion and beauty of life, he put into those letters.

He wrote to her every day and she answered every other day. She wrote in half tearful apology that her mother disapproved of a daily letter, and she added wistfully, “I should like to write to you twice a day. Take the will for the deed, and as you love me, be sure to continue yours daily.”

And on the days the letter came, with eager trembling hands he seized it, without waiting for the rest of his mail or his papers. With set face, and quick nervous step, he would mount the stairs to his office, lock his door and sit down to devour it. He would hold it in his hands sometimes for ten minutes just to laugh and muse over it and try to guess what new trick of phrase she had used to express her love. He was surprised at her brilliance and wit. He had not held her so deep a thinker on the serious things of life as these letters had showed, nor had he noticed how keen her sense of humour. He was so busy looking at her beautiful face, and drinking the love-light from her eyes, he had overlooked these things when with her. Now they flashed on him as a new treasure, that would enrich his life.

At the end of two weeks when the General had not answered his letter he began to grow nervous. A vague feeling of fear grew on him. Something had happened to darken his future. He felt it by a subtle telepathy of sympathetic thought. He was gloomy and depressed all day after he had received and feasted on the wittiest letter she had ever written. What could it mean he asked himself a thousand times—some shadow had fallen across their lives. He knew it as clearly as if the revelation of its misery were already unfolded.

He went to the post-office on the next day he was to receive a letter, crushed with a sense of foreboding. He waited until the mail was all distributed and the general delivery window flung open before he approached his box. He was afraid to look at her letter. He slowly opened the box.

There was nothing in it!

“Sam, you’re not holding out my letter to tease me, old boy?” he asked pathetically.

Sam was about to joke him about the uncertainties of love, when his eye rested on his drawn face.

“Lord no, Charlie,” he protested, “you know I wouldn’t treat you like that.”

“Then look again, you may have dropped it.&rdquo............