aiting. She
wished to ask had anything else been found, but that, if he cared to,
was for Sandy to do when he came. Then she took the letter to her room,
and stowed it in a pigeonhole of her desk against her boy's return--then
sat her down to wait.

Meanwhile the object of so much thought and love and care had ridden
many a mile, his brain in a whirl of conflicting emotions. There had
come to him the previous night, in the interval between that brief
interview with Blenke and the later meeting with his mother, a messenger
with a note. It was the same messenger, Butts, the soldier groom, who
had only a short time earlier met him with her note upon the parade.
Ray, fleeing from a possible meeting with Priscilla, had left her and
her soldier _protege_ together, and slipping out of the rear gate had
gone walking up the bluffs. It was not quite time for taps and the
sentries to begin challenging. He could have gone through the yard of
any one of the adjacent quarters and so reach the front, the promenade
walk and the wide parade, but he wished to be alone, under the starry
skies. He needed to think. What could she have meant by saying, "How
they tricked me--how I lost you?" He had blamed her bitterly, savagely,
for her cold-blooded, heartless jilting of him, without ever a word of
explanation. It was so cruel, so abominable a thing that, perhaps, even
Inez Farrell could not, without some excuse or reason, be guilty of it.
And now she was striving to tell him, to make him understand; now she
was alienated from her husband and not, so Dwight's own references to
Foster would go to prove, not because of this affair with Captain
Foster. She said it was her right to be heard. Perhaps it was. If she
had been tricked, deceived, wronged--such things had happened--the story
was old as the Deluge and might be true, and if true, was it decent to
treat her with studied contempt? If she had been tricked into throwing
him over--if, if she had been true in saying she loved him, as fervently
she swore that last sweet night under the cherry blossoms in Japan, was
it manly to--to crush and scorn her now?

He was again, with downcast eyes, slowly pacing the bluff and in rear of
the major's quarters when, far over toward the guard-house, the soft,
prolonged notes of "Lights out" were lifted on the night, and he almost
collided with a man coming quickly forth from the gate. The rear door
had closed with a bang but the moment before, and Felicie'