"Louise," she said, "does anything ever
fit in with a woman's theories when she falls in love?"

"One shouldn't fall in love," Louise said, serenely, "they should walk
squarely into it. That's what I shall do, when I get ready to
marry---- But I shall love Archibald as long as the good Lord will let
me----"

She was trying to say it lightly, but a quiver of her voice betrayed
her.

"Louise," Becky said, "what's the matter with Archibald? Is anything
really the matter?"

Louise began to cry. "Archie saw the doctor to-day, and he won't
promise anything--I made Arch tell me----"

"Oh, Louise." Becky's lips were white.

"Of course if he takes good care of himself, it may not be for years.
You mustn't let him know that I told you, Becky. But I had to tell
somebody. I've kept it all bottled up as if I were a stone image. And
I'm not a stone image, and he's all I have."

She dabbed her eyes with a futile handkerchief. The tears dripped. "I
must stop," she kept saying, "I shall look like a fright for dinner----"

But at dinner she showed no signs of her agitation. She had used
powder and rouge with deft touches. She had followed Becky's example
and wore white, a crisp organdie, with a high blue sash. With her
bobbed hair and pink cheeks she was not unlike a painted doll. She
carried a little blue fan with lacquered sticks, and she tapped the
table as she talked to Major Prime. The tapping was the only sign of
her inner agitation.

The Admiral's table that night seemed to Becky a circle of sinister
meaning. There was Archibald condemned to die--while youth still beat
in his veins---- There was Louise, who must go on without him. There
was the Admiral--the last of a vanished company; there was the Major,
whose life for four years had held--horrors. There was Madge, radiant
to-night in the love of her husband, as she had perhaps once been
radiant for Dalton.

_Georgie-Porgie_!

It was a horrid name. "_There were always so many girls to be
kissed--and it was so easy to run away----_"

She had always hated the nursery rhyme. But now it seemed, to sing
itself in her brain.

"_Georgie-Porgie,
Pudding and pie,
Kissed the girls,
And made them cry----_"

Cope was at Becky's right. "Aren't you going to talk to me? You
haven't said a word since the soup."

"Well, everybody else is talking."

"What do I care for anybody else?"

Becky wondered how Archibald did it. How he kept that