tor. The door boy sprang
across the sidewalk to open the carriage, and as she stepped wearily out,
a tall young man, erect and slender, dressed in a dark traveling suit,
fairly confronted her, raised his derby, and said: "You can give me ten
minutes now, Mrs. Frost. Be good enough to take my arm."
Bowing her head she strove to dodge by, but it was useless. Again he
confronted her. Piteously she looked up into his pale, stern face and
clasped her hands. "Oh, Rollin," she cried, "give me my letters. I dare
not--see you. Have mercy--" and down again she went in a senseless heap
upon the stone. Colonel and Mrs. Frost did not sail with the Empress of
India. Brain fever set in and for three weeks the patient never left the
hotel. Frost made his wife's dangerous illness the basis of an application
to be relieved from the Manila detail, but, knowing well it would be late
summer before the troops could be assembled there in sufficient force to
occupy the city, and that his clerks and books had gone by transport with
the second expedition in June, the War Department compromised on a
permission to delay. By the time the fourth expedition was ready to start
there was no further excuse; moreover, the doctors declared the sea voyage
was just what Mrs. Frost needed, and again their stateroom was engaged by
the Empress line, and, though weak and languid, Mrs. Frost was able to
appear in the dining-room. Meanwhile a vast amount of work was saddled on
the department to which Frost was attached, and daily he was called upon
to aid the local officials or be in consultation with the commanding
general. This would have left Mrs. Frost to the ministrations of her nurse
alone, but for the loving kindness of army women in the hotel. They
hovered about her room, taking turns in spending the afternoon with her,
or the evening, for it was speedily apparent that she had a nervous dread
of being left by herself, "or even with her husband," said the most
observing. Already it had been whispered that despite his assiduous care
and devotion during her illness, something serious was amiss. Everybody
had heard of the adventure which had preceded her alarming illness.
Everybody knew that she had been accosted and confronted by a strange
young man, at sight of whom she had pleaded piteously a minute and then
fainted dead away. By this time, too, there were or had been nearly a
dozen of the graduating class in town--classmates of Rollin Latrobe--their
much-
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