By that time the luncheon was ready, and the Admiral made himself delightfully companionable to the ladies, but Jermyn was so silent and abstracted that even Kate rallied him, asking him if the New York duties which the War Department had imposed, compelled such hard thinking? Jermyn replied that they weren't, but that the Admiral had just given him the most provoking lot of orders that one man ever received from another, so both ladies insisted at once upon knowing what the orders were, and both men maintained silence to a degree that was simply maddening, so Kate quizzed Jermyn privately, and he told her, privately, that she mustn't say another word about it. Kate afterward told Trif, in confidence, that she must have been right in supposing that the business upon which the two men had gone North, a few days before, must have been of great importance to the Government, as well as of an extremely secret nature; but that, nevertheless, it was a burning shame that older officers had such despotic control of their juniors, and that if women had charge of government affairs, there would not be any of such manifest injustice.
They all went to New York that night. While Jermyn visited the Department for his order, the Admiral scoured Washington for the projector of the gold mine, who had been in the city the day before, but as the man had already returned to the metropolis, the Admiral intended to be at his elbow, to keep the promise of stock alive until the sketches could be obtained. Should there seem to be any danger, he would promptly break the armistice and ask Trif for the fateful letter.
Suddenly, however, while the two officers were smoking together on the train, Jermyn struck terror to the Admiral's heart by saying:
"Your plan for reclaiming those pictures may be of no good. 'Tis more than likely that Highwood has destroyed that letter."
"My dear boy!" exclaimed the old man. "Please don't imagine anything so dreadful! Destroyed one hundred thousand dollars? Horrors!"
"I think it likely," continued Jermyn, "for at Old Point I chanced to hear Mrs. Highwood say that after carefully reading her husband's letters she always destroyed them, so that no one else by any chance could see them. Like husband, like wife—you know the old saying."
"But you saw the letter in Highwood's own hands," said the Admiral.
"True; but at that time his wife was away, and I suppose he kept all of her letters to look at again and again—I am sure I should do so, if I were married and my wife was away from me."
"Good boy! I'm glad to see that you already know the feeling. Still—if he should have destroyed them!"
It was the Admiral's turn to be strangely silent during the evening, and the ladies marvelled greatly at the change in a man who had seemed to them the life of whatever company he chanced to be in, and Kate found opportunity to whisper to Trif that Jermyn did not seem to be entirely under the Admiral's thumb after all, for he seemed to be in remarkably good spirits—commanding spirits, indeed, she could say.