, as has been said, were devoted friends, and
when Margaret died, leaving her husband, crushed and heartbroken, and
that idol of her heart, little Jim, it is doubtful if among her own
people she was mourned as utterly as she was by Mrs. Ray. In the years
that followed Marion was forever planning for the little fellow's
future, and pouring forth a perfect flood of sympathy for that bereaved
soldier, his father. It came as a shock inexpressible that Oswald
Dwight, after six years' brooding, had married again, and had given
Margaret's place to--what?--a girl, young, beautiful, obscure,
unprincipled--the girl whom her own Sandy had rapturously, loved and
implicitly believed in. And now Marion was called upon to meet this
woman in "the fierce white light that beats upon" garrison life--see her
daily, hourly, possibly as a next-door neighbor, and no husband's arm or
counsel to lean upon.

Nor was this all. It had been arranged that the families of officers
ordered on foreign service should retain quarters at the station from
which said officers took their departure, provided the quarters were not
actually needed by the garrison. Three out of five the big army posts
had been left with but a detachment to guard them. Minneconjou was an
exception. Hither had come Stone, with two battalions of Foot.
Headquarters, staff, band and one squadron of the cavalry had been
there, but band and headquarters were now shifted to Niobrara. How
Marion wished the squadron could have gone, too! But that was not to be.
There were still the four troops at the station, and the Rays were still
quartered in the big, roomy house to the right of the post
commander's--Marion, her sons, her niece and their two servants. There
was even abundant space for her niece's diminishing Advancement
Association--the secretary's desk and the mournful-eyed young secretary
being much in evidence at the basement window on the north side. Three
sets, the colonel's and the flanking field officers', had been built
with high piazzas and well-lighted basements beneath; all the others
were squat on the hard prairie ground. Stone had two majors with him,
both junior to Ray and the post surgeon, so they had taken root in the
lines and, for army men, were quite content. All on a sudden one day the
new major, Dwight, drove out from the railway station in town, reported
with soldierly precision to Colonel Stone, and accepted the promptly
tendered invitation to be the colonel's gu