ce expressed sarcastic disgust. Mills moved his head the
least little bit. Apparently he knew.

"Well, speaking with all possible respect, it seems to have affected my
mother's brain. I was already with the royal army and of course there
could be no question of regular postal communications with France. My
mother hears or overhears somewhere that the heiress of Mr. Allegre is
contemplating a secret journey. All the noble Salons were full of
chatter about that secret naturally. So she sits down and pens an
autograph: 'Madame, Informed that you are proceeding to the place on
which the hopes of all the right thinking people are fixed, I trust to
your womanly sympathy with a mother's anxious feelings, etc., etc.,' and
ending with a request to take messages to me and bring news of me. . .
The coolness of my mother!"

Most unexpectedly Mills was heard murmuring a question which seemed to me
very odd.

"I wonder how your mother addressed that note?"

A moment of silence ensued.

"Hardly in the newspaper style, I should think," retorted Mr. Blunt, with
one of his grins that made me doubt the stability of his feelings and the
consistency of his outlook in regard to his whole tale. "My mother's
maid took it in a fiacre very late one evening to the Pavilion and
brought an answer scrawled on a scrap of paper: 'Write your messages at
once' and signed with a big capital R. So my mother sat down again to
her charming writing desk and the maid made another journey in a fiacre
just before midnight; and ten days later or so I got a letter thrust into
my hand at the _avanzadas_ just as I was about to start on a night
patrol, together with a note asking me to call on the writer so that she
might allay my mother's anxieties by telling her how I looked.

"It was signed R only, but I guessed at once and nearly fell off my horse
with surprise."

"You mean to say that Dona Rita was actually at the Royal Headquarters
lately?" exclaimed Mills, with evident surprise. "Why,
we--everybody--thought that all this affair was over and done with."

"Absolutely. Nothing in the world could be more done with than that
episode. Of course the rooms in the hotel at Tolosa were retained for
her by an order from Royal Headquarters. Two garret-rooms, the place was
so full of all sorts of court people; but I can assure you that for the
three days she was there she never put her head outside the door.
General Mongroviejo called on her officiall