n of this letter, Mike was with the Peetrees.

Eventually Jim was strong enough to sit up for a while, and in the course
of a few days Ben helped him out into the open, and the pure, hot
sunshine seemed to pour new life into his veins. It was after this that
Done missed Aurora. Mrs. Ben said she had gone away for a few days to
recruit; but eventually, when Jim was hobbling about, she admitted that
she did not know where the girl had gone, and believed that she might not
come back.

'But why?' said Jim--' why go away without a word, without giving me a
chance to thank her for what she has done?'

'Thank her!' said Mary, with some contempt. 'Are you thinking the poor
girl wanted thanks from you?'

'It is strange that she should leave in this way,' answered Done
impatiently.

'There's nothing strange in it, man; it's just natural. You never
understood how much that girl cared for you, Jimmy. If you did, perhaps
you would know what it meant for her to be working herself to a ghost
over your bed there while you babbled of love to another woman.'

'I did?'

'Did you? Night and day. It was Lucy, Lucy, Lucy--always Lucy. Lucy with
the brown hair and the beautiful eyes--Lucy the pure, and sweet, and
good. Never a word of Joy--never the smallest word of the woman who was
beating the devil off you, you blackguard!'

'But I was delirious! Surely----'

'True, you were wandering; but it's only when a man's mad or drunk that
one gets the truth out of him about women. "There's not a thought of me
left in his heart, Mary!" said the poor girl.'

'She was wrong--wrong!' he protested.

'Not a bit, boy! 'Twas the pure girl had all your soul. Heavens! and how
you rubbed it in about her purity and goodness! Mother of us! let a man
be so infernally bad that the very fiend sniffs at him, but he'll bargain
with the impudence of an archangel for the pure girl.'

'And she went away for this?'

'Sure enough. Aurora's the sort to hide her hurts. When she can't fight
over them, she'll not cry a whimper.'

'That's true; and I've hurt her deepest of all.'

Mary detected the expression of his face with quick alarm. She had said
too much.

'There, there, Jimmy boy,' she said anxiously; 'we mustn't be forgetting
that Joy's the strong sort. She'll come again, fresh and rosy and merry
as ever--bet your life on it.'

Jim went into the tent that had been his sick-room, and sat for over an
hour in deep thought, and his thoughts were all o