et him in secret, for it was sweet to see his despair. She refused to
meet him again, however, and then he charged her with faithlessness and
demanded to be told the truth about Davies. If that fellow reappeared as
her lover he swore to kill him, and then she bade him go and never see
her more, with the result already known. And at Bluff Siding in the
crowd and confusion he might have killed Davies but for Brannan's
watchful eye and warding hand. That was the last pound that broke the
back of Brannan's feeling of friendship and gratitude. He would no more
of Powlett, yet remained true to his pledge of secrecy. Mira's dream of
joy and triumph as an army bride met its first rude shock when, under
her window at Scott, she heard stealthy footsteps and the soft, low
whistling of a familiar air, the signal with which he used to summon her
to their trysting-place at home. The mad fool thought either to recover
his ascendency over her or revenge himself by tormenting, and then, when
her husband was sent to the agency and he saw opportunity of meeting and
terrorizing her, he was infuriated with new jealousy by her flirtation
with Willett. Even there at Scott he must have written and made further
threats, for the freshest and newest of the precious collection of her
letters found in "Brannan's" case referred to something of the kind.
Driven to desperation, she wrote that she would expose him to her
husband and Captain Cranston if he again presumed to address her, and
finally wrote this last:

"My husband will be here within forty-eight hours and I have fully
resolved to confess all to him: that you, who made the cowardly assault
and left him for dead at Urbana, and have been guilty of such abominable
crimes, are here, in this garrison, a soldier in his troop. If you
remain it is at your peril. On my knees I swear it." And with this
melodramatic conclusion Mira had really frightened him. He had sense
enough to know that, with all the other complications in which he was
involved, this exposure was more than he could stand. He made other
efforts to see and plead with her, but they were fruitless, and his own
melodramatic _coup_,--his last appearance, as he supposed, before her
eyes, then followed. After that, desertion.

Davies read but two of these missives, the first and the last. He
restored them to her without a word. She was lying in the seclusion of
her shaded room at the hotel when he returned from the hospital, the
chaplain