him. A tall young man in white pantaloons and blue
jacket stood on the pier. "Good gracious, Uncle Jim, it is John!" A
strange sense of disappointed remembrance possessed her. The boy playmate
of her youth was gone. He gave both hands of welcome, as he said, "By
George, Leila, I am glad to see you."

"You may thank uncle for our visit. Aunt Ann was not very willing to part
with me."

He was about to make the obvious reply of the man, but refrained. They
talked lightly of the place, of her journey, and at last he said very
quietly, even coldly, as if it were merely a natural history observation,
"You are amazingly grown, Cousin Leila. It is as well for cadets and
officers that your stay is to be brief."

"John, I have been in Baltimore. You will have to put it stronger than
that--I am used to it."

"I will see if I can improve on it, Leila."

Now this was not at all the way she meant to meet him, nor these the
words they meant to use--or rather, she--for John Penhallow had given it
no thought, except to be glad as a child promised a gift and then
embarrassed into a word of simple descriptive admiration. When John
Penhallow said, with a curious gravity and a little of his old formal
manner, "I will reflect on it," she knew with the quick perception of her
sex that here was a new masculine study for the great naturalist woman.
The boy--the lad--she knew were no more.

"Who is that with Uncle James?" she asked.

"The Commandant."

"My niece, Miss Grey. Colonel Beauregard, my dear. Let us walk up to the
Point." The Commandant, who made good his name, took possession of the
delighted young woman and carried her away to his home with Penhallow,
leaving the cadet to return to his routine of duty. As they parted, he
said, "I am set free to-morrow, Leila, at five, and excused from the
afternoon parade. If you and Uncle Jim will walk up to Port Putnam, I
will join you."

"I will tell Uncle Jim. You will be at the hop of course? I have been
thinking of nothing else for a week."

"I may be late."

"Oh, why?"

"We are in the midst of our examinations. Even to get time for a walk
with you and uncle was hard. I wrote Uncle Jim not to come now. He must
have missed it."

"And so I am to suffer."

"I doubt the anguish," he returned, laughing, as he touched his cap, and
left her to brief consideration of the cadet cousin.

"Uncle Jim might have been just like that--looked like that. They are
very unlike too. I used to