t he met Frances Gardner, and his
experience with her was so disastrous that, in his determination to
avoid all women, he was convinced he was right.

When later he reached Manila he vowed no other woman would ever again
find a place in his thoughts. No other woman did. Not because he had
the strength to keep his vow, but because he so continually thought of
Frances Gardner that no other woman had a chance.

Miss Gardner was a remarkable girl. Her charm appealed to all kinds of
men, and, unfortunately for Lee, several kinds of men appealed to her.
Her fortune and her relations were bound up in the person of a rich
aunt with whom she lived, and who, it was understood, some day would
leave her all the money in the world. But, in spite of her charm,
certainly in spite of the rich aunt, Lee, true to his determination,
might not have noticed the girl had not she ridden so extremely well.

It was to the captain of cavalry she first appealed. But even a
cavalry captain, whose duty in life is to instruct sixty men in the art
of taking the life of as many other men as possible, may turn his head
in the direction of a good-looking girl. And when for weeks a man
rides at the side of one through pine forests as dim and mysterious as
the aisles of a great cathedral, when he guides her across the wet
marshes when the sun is setting crimson in the pools and the wind blows
salt from the sea, when he loses them both by moonlight in wood-roads
where the hoofs of the horses sink silently into dusty pine needles, he
thinks more frequently of the girl at his side than of the faithful
troopers waiting for him in San Francisco. The girl at his side
thought frequently of him.

With the "surface indications" of a young man about to ask her to marry
him she was painfully familiar; but this time the possibility was the
reverse of painful. What she meant to do about it she did not know,
but she did know that she was strangely happy. Between living on as
the dependent of a somewhat exacting relative and becoming the full
partner of this young stranger, who with men had proved himself so
masterful, and who with her was so gentle, there seemed but little
choice. But she did not as yet wish to make the choice. She preferred
to believe she was not certain. She assured him that before his leave
of absence was over she would tell him whether she would remain on duty
with the querulous aunt, who had befriended her, or as his wife
accompany h