y Hugh.
She laid the letter aside while she finished her work, too indifferent
even to open it, but when the last button-hole was fashioned in the
dainty little muslin dress she remembered it.

She opened it slowly, noticing with some interest that it was from the
Front, and then she suddenly sat up very straight and read the written
pages greedily. The letter was signed, Harry Kent, and was from a
comrade of Gavin's in the Blue Bonnets, a boy whom he had often
mentioned in his letters to Christina.

And inside was a letter from Gavin himself sealed in a separate
envelope. The first was a formal note from a shy boy.

"Dear Miss Lindsay: I hope you won't mind if I take the liberty to
write to you, though I am a stranger. Gavin Grant and I were pals, and
when he went up to the Front for the last time he gave me the letter I
am enclosing, and he asked me to mail it to you. We knew his company
was going into a hot place, and he said he did not think he would get
back. So he wrote you this letter and when I heard he was killed I
said I would mail it to you. Gavin was the finest fellow I ever knew.
He was always singing and he taught the fellows a lot of songs. There
was one he was always singing, it was called a 'Warrior Bold,' and he
was singing it that morning just before the Boche came over. The
fellows in our Company would rather we had all gone West than Gavin, he
was worth them all put together...."

There was more about what Gavin had done in that last dread struggle.
But Christina could not take the time to read it. She opened Gavin's
letter reverently, with trembling hands. The blinding tears would
permit her to make out only a few sentences at a time.

"I wrote you a letter last night," it said, "and I hope you will not
think I am too bold to be writing you another to-night. But we are
going up into a rather bad place to-night and if I do not come back, I
want to send you a good-bye message. I have never been able to tell
you how much you have always been to me. I could not even write it in
a letter. I have always been afraid I would offend you. But I thought
you would not mind that I told you if I never came back. You have
always been so far above me, that I did not have the courage to try to
go with you. And then somebody else came, and I knew I had no chance
then. But you have always been my girl in spite of all that, ever
since the day you filled my pail with your berries to save me