When Stephen, swinging his crimson fez by the tassel, stood ready to take his leave, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

After he departed Colonel Arran came, and sat, as usual, silent, listening.

Ailsa was very animated; she told him about Stephen’s enlistment, asked scores of questions about military life, the chances in battle, the proportion of those who went through war unscathed.

And at length Colonel Arran arose to take his departure; and she had not told what was hammering for utterance in every heart beat; she did not know how to tell, what to ask.

Hat in hand Colonel Arran bent over her hot little hand where it lay in his own.

“I have been offered the colonelcy of a volunteer regiment now forming,” he said without apparent interest.

“You!”

“Cavalry,” he explained wearily.

“But—­you have not accepted!”

He gave her an absent glance.  “Yes, I have accepted. . . .  I am going to Washington to-night.”

“Oh!” she breathed, “but you are coming back before—­before——­”

“Yes, child.  Cavalry is not made in a hurry.  I am to see General Scott—­perhaps Mr. Cameron and the President. . . .  If, in my absence—­” he hesitated, looked down, shook his head.  And somehow she seemed to know that what he had not said concerned Berkley.

Neither of them mentioned him.  But after Colonel Arran had gone she went slowly to her room, sat down at her desk, sat there a long, long while thinking.  But it was after midnight before she wrote to Berkley: 

“Have you quite forgotten me?  I have had to swallow a little pride to write you again.  But perhaps I think our pleasant friendship worth it.

“Stephen has been here.  He has enlisted as a private in his father’s regiment of zouaves.  I learned by accident from him that you are no longer associated with Craig & Son in business.  I trust this means at least a partial recovery of your fortune.  If it does, with fortune recovered responsibilities increase, and I choose to believe that it is these new and exacting duties which have prevented me from seeing you or from hearing from you for more than three weeks.

“But surely you could find a moment to write a line to a friend who is truly your very sincere well-wisher, and who would be the first to express her pleasure in any good fortune which might concern you.

  “AILSA PAIGE.”

Two days passed, and her answer came: 

“Ailsa Paige, dearest and most respected, I have not forgotten you for one moment.  And I have tried very hard.

“God knows what my pen is trying to say to you, and not hurt you, and yet kill utterly in you the last kindly and charitable memory of the man who is writing to you.

“Ailsa, if I had known you even one single day before that night I met you, you would have had of me, in that single day, all that a man dare lay at the feet of the truest and best of women.