questioner gazed keenly into
his face, then turned away with a smile.

Only three days before, on the register of the Occidental appeared among
the arrivals the entry "Mrs. William P. Ray, Miss Ray, Fort
Leavenworth," and that evening at least a dozen officers called and sent
up their cards, and Lieutenant Ray came in from the Presidio and was
with his mother and sister an hour or more.

The ladies held quite a little levee in the parlor of the familiar old
army hostelry, and Mr. Stuyvesant, after a long and fatiguing day's duty
at camp, accompanied his general to their very handsome apartments at
The Palace, and then falteringly asked if he might be excused awhile--he
had a call or two to make.

The evening papers had announced the arrival of the wife and daughter of
"the gallant officer so well known for quarter of a century gone by to
many of our citizens--Captain 'Billy' Ray, now colonel of the --th
Kentucky," and Stuyvesant had determined to make an effort to meet them.
But he was a stranger to the officers who called and sent up their
cards--all old regulars.

Lieutenant Ray was with the party in the parlor, and Stuyvesant felt a
strange shyness when striving to persuade himself to send his card to
that young officer and boldly ask to be presented. Surely it was the
proper thing to seek and meet her and thank her for her deft
ministrations the night of the fire. Surely a man of his distinguished
family and connections need not shrink from asking to be introduced to
any household in all our broad domain, and yet Stuyvesant found himself
nervous and hesitant, wandering about the crowded office, making
pretense of interest in posters and pictures, wistfully regarding the
jovial knots of regulars who seemed so thoroughly at home.

Over at The Palace, where so many of the general officers and their
staffs were quartered, he had dozens of friends. Here at this favorite
old resort of the regular service he stood alone, and to his proud and
sensitive spirit it seemed as though there were a barrier between him
and these professional soldiers.

There was the whole secret of his trouble. Absurd and trivial as it may
seem, Stuyvesant shrank from the enterprise, even at the very
threshold,--shrank even from sending his card and asking for Lieutenant
Ray, for no other or better reason than that he did not know how a
volunteer would be welcomed.

And so for nearly half an hour he hovered irresolute about the office,
unc