romptly urge immediate union; then the Farrells could go their
way in peace and he could bear away his beautiful bride to the Atlantic
seaboard, to be made known to his people, and to embrace little Jim. To
this Inez responded coyly that she could not think of such a plan. She
could not go back to San Francisco, a bride, in the gowns she wore while
there as Miss Farrell. Then said Dwight, we'll go straight to New
Orleans, where her mother had many friends and kinsfolk, where the best
of modistes abound, where everything a bride could possibly wear could
surely be found, and Farrell added his dictum to the pleadings of the
groom-elect. The plan appealed to him most, as it would cost him least.

When Farrell gave them his tearful benediction and farewell, ten
thousand dollars of Dwight's money was stowed away in bills of exchange
on the City of Mexico for investment in the fabulous mines of the
Sierras, and Dwight's signature was on the back of one or two bills left
in the hands of Farrell's friends and correspondents at the Bank of
California, purely, of course, for safe-keeping. And so they went on
their respective ways, Farrell not soon to be seen in God's country
again.

Three months later, with little Jim at his side and the young
step-mother dawdling along after them in her easy carriage, Captain
Dwight was tramping through Switzerland. The surgeons had said in so
many words he must not return to the Philippines for half a year, and
neither before nor after his marriage had a word reached him from the
Rays, who were his next-door neighbors and Margaret's most devoted
friends until Jimmy was nearly two years old. Even thereafter, though
stationed far apart, Marion Ray and Margaret Dwight had kept up their
correspondence almost to the end. Dwight, indeed, had seen barely half a
dozen of his former comrades, and that only by accident and in haste.
There had come since his second marriage the usual number of cards in
response to the wedding announcement sent to so many friends both in and
out of the army. There had come a curiously unusual dearth of letters of
congratulation. But every man was on the move, he persuaded himself.
Everybody was either busy in the Philippines or voyaging to or from
them. They, too, were moving from pillar to post, and letters must be
miscarrying, so few, for instance, had come from Father-in-law Farrell,
and those that did come made no mention of matters Farrell could hardly
have ignored,