; also nothing would have tempted
good old Anna to show one of her darling nursling's love-letters to
unsympathetic eyes.

Alfred Head turned to his wife. "Now, Polly," he said conciliatingly,
"you asked me for what I am paying." He took up the longest of the
letters off the table. "See here, my dear. This man gives a list of what
he would like his mother to send him every ten days. As a matter of fact
that is how I first knew Mrs. Tippins had these letters. She brought one
along to show me, to see if I could get her something special. Part of
the letter has been blacked out, but of course I found it very easy to
take that blacking out," he chuckled. "And what had been blacked out was
as a matter of fact very useful to me!"

Seeing that his wife still looked very angry and lowering, he took a big
five-shilling piece out of his pocket and threw it across at her.
"There!" he cried good-naturedly--"catch! Perhaps I will make it up to
the ten shillings in a day or two--if, thanks to these letters, I am
able to do a good stroke of business!"

Anna looked at him with fascinated eyes. The man seemed made of money.
He was always jingling silver in his pocket. Gold was rather scarce just
then in Witanbury, but whenever Anna saw a half-sovereign, she always
managed somehow to get hold of it. In fact she kept a store of silver
and of paper money for that purpose, for she knew that Mr. Head, as he
was now universally called, would give her threepence over its face
value if it was ten shillings, and fivepence if it was a sovereign. She
had already made several shillings in this very easy way.

As she walked home, after having enjoyed a frugal supper, she told
herself that it was indeed unfortunate that Major Guthrie was wounded
and missing. Had he still been with his regiment, he would certainly
have written to Mrs. Otway frequently. Anna, in the past, had
occasionally found long letters from him torn up in the waste-paper
basket, and she had also seen, in the days that now seemed so long ago,
letters in the same hand lying about on Mrs. Otway's writing-table.

CHAPTER XX

October and November wore themselves away, and the days went by, the one
very like the other. Mrs. Otway, after her long hours of work, or of
official visiting among the soldiers' and sailors' wives and mothers,
fell into the way of going out late in the afternoon for a walk by
herself. She had grown to dread with a nervous dislike the constant
meet