"There is the letter," he said; "do you want it or shall I burn it?"
She shrank back as though recoiling from a loathsome touch.
"Oh, no, no! Burn it! Here is a match," she cried, springing to the mantel, and then her overcharged heart gave way. She threw herself upon the sofa, burying her face in her hands, sobbing like a child with relief and exhaustion. Ray touched the match to the paper; had just fairly started the flame, when laughing voices and quick footsteps were heard on the piazza. The door flew open, and all in a burst of sunshine and balmy air, Marion Sanford, saying, "Oh, come right in. You haven't a moment to spare, and she'll be so glad to see you!" whisked into the room followed by Captain Webb.
Tableau!
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Army argot for commanding officer's wife.
CHAPTER XVIII.
DESERTION.
In that species of mental athletics known as jumping at conclusions Mrs. Turner was an expert. That she always hit the mark is something a regard for veracity will not permit us to assert. Indeed, it was not often that her intellectual subtlety enabled her to extract from outward appearances the true inwardness of the various matters that entered the orbit of her observations. All the same she was a born jumper, and, like the Allen revolver immortalized by Mark Twain, if she didn't always get what she went for she fetched something. Mrs. Turner could fetch a conclusion from everything she saw, and was happy in her facility. Time and again her patient lord had ventured to point a moral from her repeated mistakes of judgment, and to suggest less precipitancy in the future; but to no good purpose. Mrs. Turner's faith in the justice of her prognostications was sublime, though not unusual. It has been within the compass of our experience to meet and know undaunted women who, day after day, could, with equal positiveness, announce their theories as incontrovertible facts, or flatly contradict the assertions of those whose very position enabled them to be well informed. When Mrs. Turner was confronted with the proof of her error, and gently upbraided by the placid captain for being so positive in her affirmation or denial, that pretty matron was wont to shrug her lovely shoulders, and petulantly set aside the subject with the comprehensive excuse, "Oh, well! I didn't know."