n comforts,
luxuries and things she had always been accustomed to, and couldn't live
without. Surely he would not have her apply to papa. No, but--could she
not manage with a little less? He was willing to give up his cigars
(indeed, he had long since done so) and to make his uniforms last a year
longer--he who was in his day the most carefully dressed man at the Point.
Well--she thought perhaps he ought to do that--besides--men's fashions
changed but slowly, whereas women's--"Well, I'd rather be dead than out of
style, Frank!"

And so it went.

But if she did not love her husband there was one being in whom her
frivolous heart was really bound up--Nita--her "baby sister," as she
called her, and when Terriss, the colonel, went the way of all flesh,
preceded only a few months by the wife of his bosom, the few thousands in
life insurance he had managed to maintain went to the two daughters. Not
one penny was ever laid out in payment of the debts of either the father
or husband. Nita was sent to an extravagant finishing school in Gotham,
and along in May of the young girl's graduating year, blithe little Mrs.
Garrison arrived, fresh from the far West, and after a few weeks of
sightseeing and shopping the sisters appeared at the Point, even
half-mourning by this time discarded. Thirteen years' difference was
there in the ages of the Fairy Sisters, and not a soul save those who
knew them in former days on the frontier would have suspected it. Mrs.
Frank in evening dress didn't look over twenty.

One lovely evening early in August, just about the time that Cadet
Captain Latrobe began to show well to the front in the run for the prize,
the two sisters had gone to their room at the hotel to dress for the hop.
It was their custom to disappear from public gaze about six o'clock and
when they came floating down the stairs in filmy, diaphanous clouds of
white, the halls were well filled with impatient cavaliers in the natty
cadet uniform, and with women "waiting to see." Then the sisters would go
into the dining room and have some light refreshment, with a glass of
iced tea--and no matter how torrid the heat or how flushed and dragged
other women might look, they were inviting pictures of all that was ever
fresh, cool and fragrant. The two fluffy blonde heads would be huddled
close together a minute as they studied the bill of fare, and virtuous
matrons at other tables, fanning vigorously, would sniff and say: "All
for effect. T