to which he had been accustomed on the
puncheon floor of a mountain cabin. He had the less reason for regret
since he was privileged instead to stroll up and down the
veranda,--"promenade" was the technical term,--a slender hand,
delicately gloved, on the sleeve of his gray uniform, the old
regimentals being _de rigueur_ at these reunions. A white ball-gown,
such as he had never before seen, fashioned of tissue over lustrous
white silk, swayed in diaphanous folds against him, for these were the
days of voluminous draperies; a head of auburn hair elaborately dressed
gleamed in the moonlight near his shoulder. Miss Alicia Duval thought
him tremendously handsome; she adored his record, as she would have
said--unaware how little of it she knew--and she did not so much intend
to flirt as to draw him out, for there was something about him different
from the men of her set, and it stimulated her interest.

"Isn't the moon heavenly?" she observed, gazing at the brilliant orb,
now near the full, swinging in the sky, which became a definite blue in
its light above the massive dark mountains and the misty valley below;
for the building was as near the brink as safety permitted--nearer, the
cautious opined.

"Heavenly? Not more'n it's got a right to be. It's a heavenly body,
ain't it?" he rejoined.

"Oh, how sarcastic!" she exclaimed. "In what school did you acquire your
trenchant style?"

He thought of the tiny district school where he had acquired the very
little he knew of aught, and said nothing, laughing constrainedly in
lieu of response.

The music of the orchestra came to them from the ball-room, and the
rhythmic beat of dancing feet; the wind lifted her hair gently and
brought to them the fragrance of flowering plants and the pungent aroma
of mint down in the depths of the ravine hard by, where lurked a
chalybeate spring; but for the noisy rout of the dance, and now and
again the flimsy chatter of a passing couple on the piazza, promenading
like themselves, they might have heard the waters of the fountain rise
and bubble and break and sigh as the pulsating impulse beat like
heart-throbs, and perchance on its rocky marge an oread a-singing.

"But you don't answer me," she pouted with an affectation of
pettishness. "Do you know that you trouble yourself to talk very little,
Captain Girard?"

"I think the more," he declared.

"Think? Oh, dear me! I didn't know that anybody does anything so
unfashionable nowadays as