ained to engine sounds, wondered whether it would.
She felt that the last straw would be to be stranded in the middle of the
night in a lonely spot with this good-looking young man, who, to make
matters worse, had turned out to be twenty-five instead of nineteen. Again
they sat in silence while the machine wrenched itself in and out of ruts
and through arroyos.

She found herself wondering what his life had been? A colonel at nineteen!
She remembered the boys she had known in our own army, boys she had fed
and sewed for on their way to France. They, too, had seemed young, but she
felt a great difference. This young man suggested things of which Polly
knew little. She wondered whether it was imagination that made her fancy
that he had played a part in life which does not usually fall to
twenty-five, except in a country so disordered, so desperate as Mexico.

Some of her boy friends who had come back from France and Belgium had
carried in their faces some such suggestion, but only a few. For the most
part they had come back as they went over, those who had returned whole;
husky, lively, youngish chaps--more restless, less satisfied with life at
home, perhaps, but not older particularly.

"That's why he seems odd to me," she concluded. "He's done and seen things
that a fellow his age hasn't any business to have done and seen--that is,
the way we look at it at home. Oh dear, I wonder if we're ever going to
get there? I can't keep still much longer and yet I hate to stir him up."

"The girls in your country, do they fall in love at nineteen?" said Juan
Pachuca, suddenly. There was a softness in his voice that under other
conditions--say, in a ballroom--Polly would probably have described as
melting. In her present environment it struck her less pleasantly.

"Girls? Oh, yes, of course they do; but not in the desperate, hot-headed
way your young ladies do. At least, not usually. Of course some girls do
queer things and get into the newspapers."

"Ah, our young ladies do not get into the newspapers," commented Juan
Pachuca. "They are guarded quite carefully; that is, our girls of good
family. Most of them are very beautiful."

"But aren't they just a little bit tiresome? I mean, just being beautiful
and guarded and all that sort of thing. At home we like a girl who has
seen a little of life," apologetically.

"Not a young lady of family!" said Pachuca, decidedly.

"Well, of course, in America we don't think a lot about