rry naturally with either you or me."

"Why, Major King!" Her voice was lively with mild surprise; she was
looking at him as if for verification of his words. Then, slowly: "I
hadn't thought of any estrangement, I hadn't intended to bring you to
task for one flirtatious night. Be sure, sir, if it has given you
pleasure, it has brought me no pain."

"You began it," said he, petulantly. It is almost unbelievable how
boyishly silly a full-grown man can be.

"I began it, Major King? It's too early in the morning for a joke!"

"You were wilful and contrary; you would speak to the fellow that
day."

"Oh!" deprecatingly.

"Never mind it, though. Wilfulness doesn't become either of us,
Frances. I've tried my turn at it tonight, and it has left me cold."

"Poor man!" said she, in low voice, like a sigh. Perhaps it was not
all for Major King; perhaps not all assumed.

"Let's not quarrel, Frances."

"Not now, I'm too tired for a real good one. Leave it for tomorrow."

He rode on in silence, not sure, maybe, how much of it she meant.
Covertly she looked at him now and then, thinking better of him for
his ingenuous confession of failure to warm himself at little Nola
Chadron's heart-flame. She extended her hand.

"Forgive me, Major King," she said, very softly, not far removed,
indeed, from tenderness.

For a little while Major King left his horse to keep the road its own
way, his cavalry hands quite regardless of manuals, regulations, and
military airs. Both of them were enfolding her one. He might have held
it until they reached the post, but that she drew it away.

There were some qualms of uneasiness in her breast that hour, some
upbraidings of conscience for treason to Major King, of whom she had
been girlishly fond, girlishly proud, womanly selfish. That quick,
wild scene in the garden was not to be put away for all those
arraignments of her honest heart, although it seemed impossible,
recalled there in the thin hours of that long and eventful night, like
something remembered of another, not of herself.

Her cheeks grew hot, her heart leaped again, at the recollection of
that strong man's wild, bold words, his defiant kiss upon her lips.
She had yielded them in the recklessness of that moment, in the force
of his all-carrying demand, when she might have denied them, or sped
away from him, as innocence is believed to know from instinct when to
fly from a destructive lure.

Closing her eyes against the gray-cr