Betty Winter found to her sorrow that the memory of a dead love could be a troublesome thing. Ned Vaughan\'s tender and compelling passion had been resistless in the moonlight beneath a fragrant apple tree with the old mill wheel splashing its music at their feet. She had returned to her cot in the hospital that night in a glow of quiet, peaceful joy. Life\'s problem had been solved at last in the sweet peace of a tender and beautiful spiritual love—the only love that could be real.

All this was plain, while the glow of Ned\'s words were in her heart and the memory of his nearness alive in the fingers and lips he had kissed. And then to her terror came stealing back the torturing vision of his brother. Why, why, why could she never shut out the memory of this man!

Over and over again she repeated the angry final word:

"He isn\'t worth a moment\'s thought!"

And yet she kept on thinking, thinking, always in the same blind circle. At last came the new resolution,

"Worthy or unworthy, I\'ve given my word to a better man and that settles it."

The fight had become in her inflamed imagination the struggle between good and evil. The younger man with his chivalrous boyish ideals was God, Love, Light. The older with his iron will, his fierce ungovernable passion, was the Devil, Lust and Darkness. She trembled with new terror at the discovery that there was something elemental deep within her own life that answered the challenge of this older voice with a strange joyous daring.

She had just risen from her knees where she had prayed for strength to fight and win this battle when the maid knocked on her door. She had left the hospital and returned home for a week\'s rest, tottering on the verge of a nervous collapse since her return from the meeting with Ned.

"A letter, Miss Betty," the maid said with a smile.

She tore the envelope with nervous dread. It bore no postmark and was addressed in a strange hand.

Inside was another envelope in Ned\'s handwriting, and around it a sheet of paper on which was scrawled,

"Dear Miss Winter: The bearer of this letter is a trusted spy of both Governments. I have friends in Washington and in Richmond. In Richmond I am supposed to betray the Washington Government. In Washington it is known that I am at heart loyal to the union, and all my correspondence from Richmond to the Confederate agents in Canada and the North I deliver to the President and Stanton. This one is an exception. I happened to have met Mr. Ned. Vaughan and like him. I deliver this letter to you unopened by any hand. I\'ve a sweetheart myself."

With a cry of joy, Betty broke the seal and read Ned\'s message. It was written just after the battle of Gettysburg.

"Dearest: I am writing to you to-night because I must—though this may never reach you. The whole look of war has changed for me since that wonderful hour we spent in the moonlight beside the river and you promised me your life. It\'s all a pitiful tragedy now, and love, love, love seems the only thing in all God\'s universe worth while! I don\'t wish to kill any more. It hurts the big something inside that\'s divine. I\'m surpri............