Believe me, your friend and grateful debtor, "W.

M." Mrs.Bunker cast a hasty glance around her, and pressed the letter to her lips.

It was a sudden consummation of her vaguest, half-formed wishes, the realization of her wildest dreams! To be the confidante of the gallant but melancholy hero in his lonely exile and persecution was to satisfy all the unformulated romantic fancies of her girlish reading; to be later, perhaps, the Flora Macdonald of a middle-aged Prince Charlie did not, however, evoke any ludicrous associations in her mind.
Her feminine fancy exalted the escaped duelist and alleged assassin into a social martyr.

His actual small political intrigues and ignoble aims of office seemed to her little different from those aspirations of royalty which she had read about--as perhaps they were.

Indeed, it is to be feared that in foolish little Mrs.Bunker, Wynyard Marion had found the old feminine adoration of pretension and privilege which every rascal has taken advantage of since the flood.
Howbeit, the next morning after she had returned and Zephas had sailed away, she flew a red bandana handkerchief on the little flagstaff before the house.