as a little thing, with a mop of curled brown hair; an oval face,
pearl-tinted; wide, blue eyes. He dwelt on all her small
perfections--the brows that swept across her forehead in a thin black
line, the transparency of her slender hands, the straight set of her
head on her shoulders, the slight halt in her speech like that of an
enchanting child.

Yet she was not in the least a child. "She holds me up to my best, Miss
Standish," Jimmie told me; "she says I can write."

We knew that Jimmie had written a few things, gay little poems that he
showed us now and then in the magazines. But we had not taken them at
all seriously. Indeed, Jimmie had not taken them seriously himself.

But now he took them seriously. "Elise says that I can do great things.
That I must get out of the Department."

To the rest of us, getting out of the government service would have
seemed a mad adventure. None of us would have had the courage to
consider it. But it seemed a natural thing that Jimmie should fare forth
on the broad highway--a modern D'Artagnan, a youthful Quixote, an Alan
Breck--!

We hated to have him leave. But he had consolation. "Of course you'll
come and see us. We're going back to my old house in Albemarle. It's a
rotten shack, but Elise says it will be a corking place for me to write.
And you'll all come down for week-ends."

We felt, I am sure, that it was good of him to ask us, but none of us
expected that we should ever go. We had a premonition that Elise