they?"

"Most of them," he admitted, "and I think the reason is that we've been
soldiers. The army discipline is good for a man. It narrows a fellow, I
suppose, but it keeps him straight."

Then he began to laugh silently.

"What is it?" she said, curiously.

"Oh, nothing! I was just wondering what my strait-laced ancestors would
say if they could see me now."

"What do you mean?" the girl asked, in open-eyed wonderment.

"I don't care," he went on, unheeding her question. "They did worse
things in their time, from what I hear." He leaned forward to draw her
to him.

"Worse things? But we are doing nothing bad," said Necia, holding him
off. "There's no wrong in loving."

"Of course not," he assured her.

"I am proud of it," she declared. "It is the finest thing, the greatest
thing that has ever come into my life. Why, I simply can't hold it; I
want to sing it to the stars and cry it out to the whole world. Don't
you?"

"I hardly think we'd better advertise," he said, dryly.

"Why not?"

"Well, I shouldn't care to publish the tale of this excursion of ours,
would you?"

"I don't see any reason against it. I have often taken trips with
Poleon, and been gone with him for days and days at a time."

"But you were not a woman then," he said, softly.

"No, not until to-day, that's true. Dear, dear! How I did grow all of a
sudden! And yet I'm just the same as I was yesterday, and I'll always
be the same, just a wild little. Please don't ever let me be a big
tame. I don't want to be commonplace and ordinary. I want to be
natural--and good."

"You couldn't be like other women," he declared, and there was more
tenderness than hunger in his tone now, as she looked up at him
trustingly from the shelter of his arms. "It would spoil you to grow
up."

"It is so good to be alive and to love you like this!" she continued,
dreamily, staring into the fire. "I seem to have come out of a gloomy
house into the glory of a warm spring day, for my eyes are blinded and
I can't see half the beautifuls I want to, there are so many about me."

"Those are my arms," interjected the soldier, lightly, in an effort to
ward off her growing seriousness.

"I've never been afraid of anything, and yet I feel so safe inside
them. Isn't it queer?"

The young man became conscious of a vague discomfort, and realized
dimly that for hours now he had been smothering with words and caresses
a something that had striven with him to be hear