Most unexpectedly Mills was heard murmuring a question which seemed
to me very odd.
"I wonder how your mother addressed that note?"
A moment of silence ensued.
"Hardly in the newspaper style, I should think," retorted Mr.
Blunt, with one of his grins that made me doubt the stability of
his feelings and the consistency of his outlook in regard to his
whole tale. "My mother's maid took it in a fiacre very late one
evening to the Pavilion and brought an answer scrawled on a scrap
of paper: 'Write your messages at once' and signed with a big
capital R. So my mother sat down again to her charming writing
desk and the maid made another journey in a fiacre just before
midnight; and ten days later or so I got a letter thrust into my
hand at the avanzadas just as I was about to start on a night
patrol, together with a note asking me to call on the writer so
that she might allay my mother's anxieties by telling her how I
looked.
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