Mitty brought it up to her room on a sunny April afternoon, where she was sitting, trying to interest herself in some sewing for baby Hugh. She laid the letter aside while she finished her work, too indifferent even to open it, but when the last button-hole was fashioned in the dainty little muslin dress she remembered it.
She opened it slowly, noticing with some interest that it was from the Front, and then she suddenly sat up very straight and read the written pages greedily. The letter was signed, Harry Kent, and was from a comrade of Gavin's in the Blue Bonnets, a boy whom he had often mentioned in his letters to Christina.
And inside was a letter from Gavin himself sealed in a separate envelope. The first was a formal note from a shy boy.
"Dear Miss Lindsay: I hope you won't mind if I take the liberty to write to you, though I am a stranger. Gavin Grant and I were pals, and when he went up to the Front for the last time he gave me the letter I am enclosing, and he asked me to mail it to you. We knew his company was going into a hot place, and he said he did not think he would get back. So he wrote you this letter and when I heard he was killed I said I would mail it to you. Gavin was the finest fellow I ever knew. He was always singing and he taught the fellows a lot of songs. There was one he was always singing, it was called a 'Warrior Bold,' and he was singing it that morning just before the Boche came over. The fellows in our Company would rather we had all gone West than Gavin, he was worth them all put together...."
There was more about what Gavin had done in that last dread struggle. But Christina could not take the time to read it. She opened Gavin's letter reverently, with trembling hands. The blinding tears would permit her to make out only a few sentences at a time.
"I wrote you a letter last night," it said, "and I hope you will not think I am too bold to be writing you another to-night. But we are going up into a rather bad place to-night and if I do not come back, I want to send you a good-bye message. I have never been able to tell you how much you have always been to me. I could not even write it in a letter. I have always been afraid I would offend you. But I thought you would not mind that I told you if I never came back. You have always been so far above me, that I did not have the courage to try to go with you. And then somebody else came, and I knew I had no chance then. But you have always been my girl in spite of all that, ever since the day you filled my pail with your berries to save me from a thrashing. I was always singing about you when I sang that old song,
"'My love is young and fair,
My love has golden hair,
And eyes so blue and heart so true
That none with her compare.'
"It was partly because you were so much to me that I wanted to enlist. I felt that I would be fighting for you. And if I do not come back to-morrow I will be glad to feel that I will be helping to save you from harm. You will not miss me, but the Aunties will, and I am going to ask a great favour of you. Will you always go to see them, and comfort them? And tell them they must not grieve for me. It is so much better to come out here and die for a good cause than to live in peace and safety at home. I am so glad, and they must be glad too, for my sake. I will have your little ring——"
Christina could read no more just then. Her bright head went down on the sunny window sill, she slipped to the floor in a very passion of grief. She was realising with overwhelming remorse that a most beautiful thing had happened to her and her eyes had been too blind to see until the pageant had faded. Her True Knight—and what lady of high degree had a knight more noble?—her True Knight had ridden out to mortal combat, and she had not even waved him farewell from her window!
She left the work with Mitty the next day and went up over the hills to see the Grant Girls. She did not take her letter, it was too sacred for even their loving eyes, but she wanted to talk to them about Gavin and, if she were alone with Auntie Elspie, she would whisper to her that her heart had gone out into the storm and darkness after Gavin that night he went to the war, and that it still followed him somewhere in the shining regions where he moved.