unit on that head. He was as
utterly out of place there as a cat in a creamery. They who had heard
the story of his attentions to Mrs. Dwight during the _Hohenzollern's_
run from Gibraltar to Governor's Island were disturbed by his sudden and
unheralded appearance at the post, and distressed that Dwight should be
among the first to welcome him, and the one, and at first the only one,
to invite him to a room under his roof. Men looked every which way but
at each other and held their tongues when it was announced that Foster
was the guest of the Dwights. Women looked into each other's eyes and
gasped and said all manner of things as the news went round. Yet what,
at first at least, was there to block the plan? The infantry officers
felt that _they_ must not take the initiative; it was purely a cavalry
affair. Dwight and Foster had served together several years. Dwight
possibly did feel, as he too often took occasion to say, more than
grateful to Foster for "his courtesy to Mrs. Dwight while I was cooped
up in my stateroom." Two or three cavalry chums, taking secret counsel
together, hit upon a blundering, clumsy, best-intentioned scheme, and
Washburn, who couldn't bear Foster and had never foregathered with him,
was deputed, as the only captain with spare rooms and no family, to take
the bull by the horns and the unwanted visitor to his ingle nook, which
Washburn did with simulated joviality and about as follows:

"Say, old man, _you_ don't want to be roosting in a dove-cote while the
birds are billing and cooing. You can't have any fun at Dwight's. You'll
get nothing but Apollinaris between meals. Come to my shack, where
there's a room--and a demijohn--all ready for you," which bid proved,
unhappily, none too alluring. Foster thanked him with a glint in his
eye. "Dwight asked me long ago," said he, which was the petrified truth,
though Dwight's words were perfunctory, and the invitation one of those
things so often said to a man when the sayer hopes to Heaven he's seeing
the last of him.

But now that Foster _was_ here, his guest, nothing could exceed the glow
of Dwight's hospitality. It was painful to note the eagerness with which
he sought to assure all Minneconjou of his long-standing friendship for
Foster in face of the fact that some of the squadron well knew they had
never met in Margaret's day, and were never really comrades thereafter.
Moreover, they were men of utterly divergent mold and temperament.
Dwight had