not--I would not now if I were--all. Oh, Jack,--my husband,
there--there is another reason."

CHAPTER V.

MARION SANFORD.

As a school-girl Marion Sanford started by being unpopular. On first
acquaintance there were very few girls in Madame Reichard's excellent
establishment who did not decide that she was cold and unsympathetic.
Courteous, well-bred, self-possessed, she was to a fault,
but--unpardonable sin in school-girl eyes--she shrank from those dear
and delicious intimacies, those mushroom friendships of our tender
years, that are as explosive as fire-crackers and as evanescent as the
smoke thereof. The volumes of satire that have been written on the
subject have exhausted the field and rendered new ideas out of the
question, but they have in no wise diminished the impetuosity with which
such friendships are daily, hourly entered into, and they never will.
Ours is a tale which has little that is new and less that is didactic.
Army life and army loves differ, after all, but little from those which
one sees in every community. Human nature is the same the world over,
despite our different tenets and traditions. Boys are as full of
mischief and sure to get into scrapes as in the days of Elijah and the
bears. Girls have had their sweet secrets and desperate intimacies with
one another since long before Elijah was heard of. Nothing one can say
is apt to put a stop to what the Almighty set in motion. Let us not rail
at what we cannot correct, but make the best of it. Let us accept the
truth. School-girls meet, take desperate and sudden fancies, swear
eternal friendships, have eternal tiffs and squabbles, kiss and make up,
fall out again, and as they grow in grace and wisdom they keep up the
system, simply taking a new object every few months. It is one of their
weaknesses by divine right, over which common sense has no more control
than it has over most of ours.

But Marion Sanford had no such weakness. Being destitute of the longing
for intimate and confidential intercourse with some equally romantic
sister, she was spared the concomitant heartburnings, recriminations,
and enmities. She passed her first year at the school without an
intimate friend. She left it without an enemy. Hers was not the most
brilliant mind in the class. She was not the valedictorian of the school
on that eventful day when,

"Sweet girl-graduates with their shining hair,"

they listened in tears and white muslin to Madame's