nothing of Patty Vetch except that she charmed him against
his will; and, for the moment at least, this was sufficient.

"Oh, there are sprains and sprains," she answered, with the quiver of
her lip he remembered so disturbingly. "Didn't you learn that in the
trenches?" Was she really pretty, or was it only the provocative appeal
to his imagination, the dangerous sense that you never knew what she
would dare to say next?

"I didn't go there to learn about sprains," he responded gravely.

"Nor about maneuvers apparently?" She hesitated over the word as if it
were unfamiliar.

At her charge the light of battle leaped to his eyes. "Then it was a
maneuver? I suspected as much."

The audacity of her! The unparalleled audacity! "But I am not so much
interested in maneuvers," he added merrily, "as I am in the strategy
behind them."

She looked puzzled, though her manner was still mocking. "Is there
always strategy," she pronounced the word with care, "behind them?"

"Always in the art of warfare."

"But can't there be a maneuver without warfare?" He could see that she
was venturing beyond her depths; but he realized that a confession of
ignorance was the last thing he must ever expect from her. Whatever the
challenge she would meet it with her natural wit and her bright
derision.

"Never," he rejoined emphatically. "A campaign goes either before or
afterward."

A thoughtful frown knit her forehead. "Well, one didn't go before, did
it?" she inquired with an innocent air. "So I suppose--"

He ended her sentence on a note of merriment. "Then I must be prepared
for the one that will follow!"

She threw out her hand with a gesture of mock despair. "Oh, you may have
been mistaken, you know!"

"Mistaken? About the campaign?"

"No, about the maneuver. Perhaps there wasn't any such thing, after
all."

"Perhaps." Though his voice was stern, his eyes were laughing. "I am not
so easily fooled as that."

"I doubt if you could be fooled at all." It was the first bit of
flattery she had tossed him, and he found it strangely agreeable.

"I am not sure of that," he answered, "but the thing that perplexes
me--the only thing--is why you should have thought it worth while."

Her eyes grew luminous with laughter, and the little red wings quivered
as if they were about to take flight over her arching brows. "How do you
know that I thought about it at all? Sometimes things just happen."

"But not in this case. You had arran