d taken the cottage and asked us
to visit her only for six weeks. Besides, Alvarado would be desolate
without our best friends and possible lovers.

I could see these thoughts developing and following on one another's
heels in Diana's mind. But in my head there was nothing concrete enough
to call a "thought." Feelings seemed to have raced upstairs from heart
to brain, and driven ideas out of the house. They ran wildly round and
round, saying to each other, "What if I never see him again? What if he
should be killed?" But while we were in this state, Mrs. Kilburn
telephoned to Kitty Main that she had decided to have her dance in spite
of all. Her husband was not among those ordered away, and the officers
who were going had arranged to spare time to look in for three or four
dances in any case. Some of them might be very early, some very late,
but there would be plenty of other men to go round; and Mrs. Kilburn
suggested that we might "keep things up" long enough to see the soldiers
off at dawn, before motoring back to the Springs, if that would interest
Lady Diana and Lady Peggy O'Malley.

There was only one answer to this, and when we went over to Fort
Alvarado for the dance we put on warmer cloaks than we should have worn
ordinarily.

Mrs. Kilburn had brought her husband money; and as she loved gayety she
had somehow got permission to build on to the captain's quarters a
ballroom surrounded on three sides by a wide veranda. Consequently, a
dance at the Kilburns' was worth going to always, and particularly on
this moonlight night of April when the whole fort was humming with
excitement. The officers who were ordered away had their hands full of
work, yet the young ones managed to get off duty if only for a few
minutes, long enough to snatch a dance or two with the girls they liked
best, or to "sit out" with them on the veranda, where there were
colonies of chairs, and garden seats, and hammocks.

Tony Dalziel was one of those who came early to the Kilburns'. He had
asked me beforehand for six dances, and I had given him three. When he
appeared it was just in time for the first, a two-step. The second would
follow directly after, and the third I knew already, from a note sent me
in haste, he would have to miss.

"Do you care for this?" he asked, out of breath with his hurry to dress
and sprint over from the far-off line of bachelors' quarters. "If you
don't, will you come outside and see the moon rise? It's going to