n
accompaniment to youth, took his place at the piano and, with a pose
worthy of Rubinstein, struck a few preliminary chords, while the group
about the fire noisily settled itself for the evening.

"You can put your head against my knees, if you like," Rose said to Quin,
who was sprawling on the floor at her feet. "There, is that comfy?"

"I'll say it's all right!" said Quin with heartfelt satisfaction.

There was something free and easy and gipsy-like about the evening, a
sort of fireside picnic that brought June dreams in January. As the hours
wore on, the singing, which had been noisy and rollicking, gradually
mellowed into sentiment, a sentiment that found vent in dreamy eyes and
long-drawn-out choruses, with a languorous over-accentuation of the
sentimental passages. One by one, the singers fell under the spell of the
music and the firelight. Cass and Fan Loomis sat shoulder to shoulder on
the broken-springed couch and gazed with blissful oblivion into the red
embers on the hearth. Rose, whose voice led all the rest, surreptitiously
wiped her eyes when no one was looking; Edwin and Myrna, solemnly
plucking their banjo and guitar, were lost in moods of dormant emotion;
while Papa Claude at the piano let his dim eyes range the pictured walls,
while his memory traveled back through the years on many a secret tryst
of its own.

But it was the lank Sergeant with the big feet, and the hair that stood
up where it shouldn't, who dared to dream the most preposterous dream of
them all. For, as he sang there in the firelight, a little god was busy
lighting the tapers in the most sacred shrines of his being, until he
felt like a cathedral at high mass with all the chimes going.

"There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And a white moon beams."

How many times he had sung it in France!--jolting along muddy, endless
roads, heartsick, homesick.

"There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true,
Till the day when I'll be going
Down that long, long trail with you."

What had "you" meant to him then? A girl--a pretty girl, of course; but
_any_ girl. And now?

Ah, now he knew what he had been going toward, not only on those terrible
roads in France, but all through the years of his life. An exquisite,
imperious little officer's girl with divinely compassionate eyes, who
wasn't ashamed to dance with a pr