th a margin of only two demerits
Will had safely weathered the reefs and was practically safe,--safe at
last. He had passed brilliantly in engineering; had been saved by his
prompt and ready answers the consequences of a "fess" with clean
black-board in ordnance and gunnery; had won a ringing, though
involuntary, round of applause from the crowded galleries of the
riding-hall by daring horsemanship, and he was now within seven days of
the prized diploma and his commission. "For heaven's sake, Billy,"
pleaded big Burton, the first captain, "don't do any thing to ruin your
chances now! I've just been talking with your mother and Miss Nannie,
and I declare I never saw that little sister of yours looking so white
and worried."

McKay laughs, yet his laugh is not light-hearted. He wonders if Burton
has the faintest intuition that at this moment he is planning an
escapade that means nothing short of dismissal if detected. Down in the
bottom of his soul he knows he is a fool to have made the rash and
boastful pledge to which he now stands committed. Yet he has never
"backed out" before, and now--he would dare a dozen dismissals rather
than that she should have a chance to say, "I knew you would not come."

That very afternoon, just after the ride in the hall before the Board of
Visitors, Miss Waring had been pathetically lamenting that with another
week they were to part, and that she had seen next to nothing of him
since her arrival.

"If you only _could_ get down to Hawkshurst!" she cried. "I'm sure when
my cousin Frank was in the corps he used to 'run it' down to Cozzens's
to see Cousin Kate,--and that was what made her Cousin Kate to me," she
adds, with sudden dropping of the eyelids that is wondrously effective.

"Easily done!" recklessly answers McKay, whose boyish heart is set to
hammer-like beating by the closing sentence. "I didn't know you sat up
so late there, or I would have come before. Of course I _have_ to be
here at 'taps.' No one can escape that."

"Oh,--but really, Mr. McKay, I did not mean it! I would not have you run
such a risk for worlds! I meant--some other way." And so she protests,
although her eyes dance with excitement and delight. What a feather this
in her cap of coquetry! What a triumph over the other girls,--especially
that hateful set at Craney's! What a delicious confidence to impart to
all the little coterie at Hawkshurst! How they must envy her the
romance, the danger, the daring, the de