ly that in
the impulse and sting of the moment she has given an unfair coloring to
the whole matter. Mr. Stanley had volunteered no such remark as that she
so vehemently quoted. Asked point blank whether he considered as given
"on suspicion" the report which Mrs. McKay and Nannie so resented, he
replied that he did not; and, when further pressed, he said that Will
alone was blamable in the matter: Mr. Lee had no alternative, if it was
Mr. Lee who gave the report, and any other officer would have been
compelled to do the same. All this "Miss Mischief" would gladly have
explained to Nannie could she have gained admission, but the latter "had
a splitting headache," and begged to be excused.

It has been such a lovely afternoon. The halls were filled with cadets
"on permit," when she came out from the dining-room, but nothing but
ill-luck seemed to attend her. The young gentleman who had invited her
to walk to Fort Putnam, most provokingly twisted an ankle at cavalry
drill that very morning, and was sent to hospital. _Now_, if Mr. Stanley
were all devotion, he would promptly tender his services as substitute.
Then she could take him to task and punish him for his disloyalty to
Will. But Mr. Stanley was not to be seen: "Gone off with another girl,"
was the announcement made to her by Mr. Werrick, a youth who dearly
loved a joke, and who saw no need of explaining that the other girl was
his own sister. Sorely disappointed, yet hardly knowing why, she
accepted her mother's invitation to go with her to the barracks where
Will was promenading the area on what Mr. Werrick called "one of his
perennial punishment tours." She went, of course; but the distant sight
of poor Will, duly equipped as a sentry, dismally tramping up and down
the asphalt, added fuel to the inward fire that consumed her. The
mother's heart, too, yearned over her boy,--a victim to cruel
regulations and crueler task-masters. "What was the use of the
government's enticing young men away from their comfortable homes," Mrs.
McKay had once indignantly written, "unless it could make them happy?"
It was a question the "tactical department" could not answer, but it
thought volumes.

But now evening had come, and with it Mr. Stanley's card. Nan's heart
gave a bound, but she went down-stairs with due deliberation. She had
his card in her hand as she reached the hall, and was twisting it in her
fingers. Yes. There he stood on the north piazza, Pennock with him, and
one