ith them to Chicago. Even if her people could not
make her welcome at Urbana, she could board there with former friends in
perfect comfort, and be ready to rejoin him by and by. Many and many an
army wife and mother had similarly to live a Bedouin life that summer.
One cavalry regiment, the --th, for instance, was scattered from
Cheyenne to Chicago, facing riotous mobs one month and chasing Indians
all over the upper Yellowstone the next. One thing Davies firmly yet
gently strove to impress upon Mira,--that her intimates at Scott were
not at all the women with whom a poor and debt-burdened officer's wife
should foregather. He begged her to be guided by Mrs. Cranston and Mrs.
Leonard, and wrote a brief line to the chaplain, commending Mira to his
care, and then he had to go.

But once back at Scott, where she could sport the lovely toilets with
which her hopeful aunt had supplied her, Mira went the way of the
empty-headed. Admiration, adulation were to her as the breath of life.
So long as she was perfectly innocent of wrong intent how could
people--how dare people rebuke her? She told Willett the horrid things
Mrs. Darling, Mrs. Plodder, and Mrs. Stone were reported to have said,
and he replied that it was all because they envied her her beauty and
were jealous of the attentions she won. She almost told him what the
chaplain said, but that sent the burning blushes to her forehead, yet
she dreaded what the old soldier of the cross might have written to her
husband. She knew he would surely condemn the renewal of her association
with Mr. Willett, but so long as he wasn't there to say so, and so long
as she intended the association to be purely platonic, as a rebuke to
all who had rebuked her, she proposed to assume that no objection
existed.

The news that he had been sent for and was coming in as a witness in
Captain Devers's court startled her inexpressibly, despite her conscious
rectitude. She told Willett that very evening, as they were driving
slowly among the willow-wooded islands, and he looked imploringly into
her eyes, and Mrs. Flight and Mr. Burtis on the back seat could see that
he was talking eagerly, earnestly, pleadingly, and that her eyes were
downcast, her cheeks aflame, and still they did not take alarm. "She's
too much in love with herself and her own good looks ever to do that
foolish thing," said Mrs. Flight to those who asked her why she didn't
warn her. Willett himself, so Burtis afterwards declared