She was not disappointed. The letter came and it was pleasantly bulky and appeared ample enough to have contained an indexed gun powder plot. She was so sure that Mitchell had been fully equal to the occasion that she tore the envelope open with a smile—and read:

MY DEAR MRS. ROSSCOTT:
To think of my having some of your handwriting for my own!—I was nearly petrified with joy.
You see I know your writing from having read Burnett all those “Burn this at once” epistles. And I know it still better from having to catalogue them for his ready reference. You know how impatient he is. (But I have run into an open switch and must digress backwards.)
I shall preserve your letter till I die. In war I shall wear it carefully spread all over wherever I may be killed, and in peace I intend to keep my place in my Bible with it. Could words say more! (Being backed up again, I will now begin.)
I was not at all surprised at your writing me. If you had known me it would have been different. But where ignorance is bliss any woman but yourself is always liable to pitch in with a pen, and you see you are not yourself but only “any woman” to me as yet. Besides, women have written to me before you. My mother does so regularly. She encloses a postal card and all I have to do is to mail it and there she is answered. It’s a great scheme which I proudly invented when I first went away to school and I recommend it to you if you—if you ever have a mother.
How my ink does run away with me! Let me refer to your esteemed favor again! Ah! we have worked down to the bed-rock, or—in Hugh Miller’s colloquial phrasing—to the “old red sandstone,” of the fact that you want Jack. You state the fact with what you designate as brutal candor—and I reply with candied brutality, that I have thought that all along. If you are averse to my view of the matter, you must look out of the window the whole time that I continue, for once entered I always fight to a finish and I cannot retire to my corner on this auspicious occasion without announcing through a trumpet that even if Jack is a most idiotic fellow I never have caught the microbe from him, and, as a sequence, have always seen clear through and out of the other side of the whole situation. Of course I should not say this to any woman but you because it would not have any meaning to her, but, between you and me all things are printed in plain black and white and, therefore, I respectfully submit a program consisting of the two o’clock train Tuesday and myself, to be recognized by a beaming look of burning joy, upon the platform. Beyond that you may confide yourself to waxing waxy in my hands. They are not bad hands to be in as your brother and whatever-you-call-Jack can testify. I will lay my lines in the dark to the end that you may bloom in the sun.
Trust me. You need do no more—except buy your ticket.
The two o’clock on Tuesday. You can easily remember it by the T’s—if you don’t get mixed with three o’clock on Thursday. Try remembering it by the 2’s. A safe way would be to put it down.

Yours to obey,
HERBERT KENDRICK MITCHELL.

P.S. Please recollect that I am only handsome according to the good old proverb, and do not mistake me for an enterprising hackman.

Mrs. Rosscott clapped her hands with delight when she finished the letter. She was overjoyed at the success of her “opening play,” and she wrote her new correspondent two lines accepting his invitation, and went down on the appointed train on the appointed day. He met her at the depot and they divined one another at the first glance. It was impossible not to know so pretty a woman—or so homely a man. For the ancestors of Mitchell had worn kilts and red hair in centuries gone by, and although he proved the truth of the red-hair proposition, no one would ever believe that anything of his build could ever have been induced to have put itself into kilts—knowingly. Furthermore, his voice had a crick in it, and went by jerks, and his eyebrows sympathized with his voice, and the eyes below them were little and gray and twinkling, and altogether he was the sort of man who is termed—according to a certain style of phrasing—“above suspicion.” But she liked him, oh! immensely, and he liked her. And when they were riding up in the carriage together she felt how thoroughly trustworthy his gray eyes and good smile declared him to be, and had no hesitation in telling him what she wanted to do, and in asking him what she wanted to know.

Mitchell certainly had a talent for plotting, for when they reached the house where the culprits were temporarily domiciled, Burnett had gone out to give his mended ribs some exercise, and Jack was reading alone in the room where they shared one another’s liniments with friendly generosity.

The arch-conspirator went upstairs, came down, and then, seeking the lady whom he had left in the parlor, said to her:

“Denham’s up there and you can go up and say whatever you have to say. You know ‘In union there is strength.’ Well you’ve got him alone now, and he’ll prove weakly as a consequence or I miss my guess.”

Then he walked straight over by the window and picked up a magazine as if it was all settled, and she only hesitated for half a second before she turned and went upstairs.

There was a door half open in the hall above, and she knew that that must be the door. She tapped at it lightly, and a man’s voice (a voice that she knew well), called out gruffly: