ne of several plucked and
deluded victims of a female sharper. While the Frenchwoman ogled and
languished behind the bars, Shannon wandered out into the world again,
a deserter from the troop he was ashamed to face, an unfollowed,
unsought fugitive among the mining camps in the Sierras. "Three stout
soldiers stricken from the rolls--two of them gone to their last
account," mused poor Plume, as at last he led his unhappy wife away to
the sea, "and all the work of one woman!"

Yes, Mrs. Plume was gone now for good and all, her devoted, yet
sore-hearted major with her, and Wren was sufficiently recovered to be
up and taking the air on his veranda, where Sanders sometimes stopped
to see him, and "pass the time of day," but cut his visits short and
spoke of everything but what was uppermost in his mind, because his
better half persuaded him that only ill would come from preaching.
Then, late one wonderful day, the interesting invalid, Mr. Neil
Blakely himself, was "paraded" upon the piazza in the Sanders's
special reclining-chair, and Kate and Mrs. Sanders beamed, while
nearly all society at the post came and purred and congratulated and
took sidelong glances up the row to where Angela but a while before
was reading to her grim old father, but where the father now read
alone, for Angela had gone, as was her custom at the hour, to her own
little room, and thither did Janet conceive it her duty to follow,
and there to investigate.

"It won't be long now before that young man will be hobbling around
the post, I suppose. How do you expect to avoid him?" said the elder
maiden, looking with uncompromising austerity at her niece. Angela as
before had just shaken loose her wealth of billowy tresses and was
carefully brushing them. She did not turn from the contemplation of
her double in the mirror before her; she did not hesitate in her
reply. It was brief, calm, and to the point.

"I shall not avoid him."

"Angela! And after all I--your father and I--have told you!" And Aunt
Janet began to bristle.

"Two-thirds of what you told me, Aunt Janet, proved to be without
foundation. Now I doubt--the rest of it." And Aunt Janet saw the big
eyes beginning to fill; saw the twitching at the corners of the soft,
sensitive lips; saw the trembling of the slender, white hand, and the
ominous tapping of the slender, shapely foot, but there wasn't a
symptom of fear or flinching. The blood of the Wrens was up for
battle. The child was a woman