ful eyes were they when, in all their girlish
fearlessness and innocence, they first beamed upon our old friends of
the --th in the days of exile in Arizona. Lovelier still are they now in
that consummation of a woman's happiness,--a worshipped wifehood. It was
early in the previous winter when Captain Truscott brought his fair
bride to make her home among the scenes so dear to both, and her life
has been one song of unutterable gladness. If earth contained a thing to
wish for in those six months, Grace Truscott could not name it. Her
pretty army house is the gem of the military community, the envy of many
a wife. Her husband is a man whom all men honor and hold in deep esteem.
In strength, in dignity, in soldierly ability, and in his devotion to
her he is all her heart could ask. If she loved him dearly when they
were married, her love has developed into almost an idolatry,--"Jack" is
her world. Not that she talks or writes very much of that matter,
however; for quite a wise little head is that which is perched on Mrs.
Truscott's white shoulders. Once in a while in some letter to an old and
trusted friend she finds it more than she can do to utterly repress her
overwhelming sense of bliss, and then she lets slip some little
confession of which Jack is the subject. She never dreamed a man could
be so lovely, so delicate, so thoughtful, so considerate, so
_everything_ that was simply perfect, is the way she has once or twice
found herself constrained to clinch the matter in default of adjectives
sufficiently descriptive. "Every day he develops some new, lovely, and
unsuspected trait," she once confided to her friend Mrs. Tanner (with
whom she has corresponded quite regularly since her marriage, and to
whom we are indebted for some of these interesting details), and as Jack
Truscott was confessedly a man of many admirable qualities before his
matrimonial alliance, it may be conjectured that ere the waning of her
honeymoon Mrs. Jack's enumeration table was beginning to prove
inadequate. And bliss has been, and is, becoming to Grace. She has lost
none of the girlish delicacy of expression which was so marked a
characteristic of her youthful beauty a year before, still she has
rounded somewhat, and both mentally and physically has developed. The
slender white hand that rests upon the volume of Carlyle in her lap
looks less fragile than it did that day at old Camp Sandy when, in
Tanner's library searching for the children's boo