't understand your
coming out like this, at night, without your uniform. I told Cass I'd
take care of you, and I'm going to do it."

"You mean that you will dare to stop me from getting out of my own car?
Take your hand off that door instantly!"

She actually seized his big, strong fingers with her small gloved ones
and tried to pull them away from the door. But Quin began to laugh, and
in spite of herself she laughed back; and, while the two were childishly
struggling for the possession of the door-handle, Captain Phipps all
unnoticed passed out of the mess-hall, gave a few instructions to his
waiting orderly, and disappeared in the darkness.

CHAPTER 7

By the time they were on their way home, the moon, no longer dodging
behind chimneys, had swaggered into the open. It was a hardened old
highwayman of a moon, red in the face and very full, and it declared with
every flashing beam that it was no respecter of persons, and that it
intended doing all the mischief possible down there in the little world
of men.

Miss Eleanor Bartlett was its first victim. In the white twilight she
forgot the social gap that lay between her and the youth beside her. She
ceased to observe the size and roughness of his hands, but noted instead
the fine breadth of his shoulders. She concerned herself no longer with
his verbal lapses, but responded instead to his glowing confidence that
everybody was as sincere and well intentioned as himself. She discovered
what the more sophisticated Rose had perceived at once--that Quinby
Graham "had a way with him," a beguiling, sympathetic way that made one
tell him things that one really didn't mean to tell any one. Of course,
it was partly due to the fact that he asked such outrageously direct
questions, questions that no one in her most intimate circle of friends
would dare to ask. And the queer part of it was that she was answering
them.

Before she realized it she was launched on a full recital of her woes,
her thwarted ambition to go on the stage, her grandmother's tyranny, the
indignity of being sent back to a school from which she had run away six
months before. She flattered herself that she was stating her case for
the sole purpose of getting an unprejudiced outsider's unbiased opinion;
but from the inflection of her voice and the expressive play of eyes and
lips it was evident that she was deriving some pleasure from the mere act
of thus dramatizing h