"John, I have been in Baltimore. You will have to put it stronger than that--I am used to it."
"I will see if I can improve on it, Leila."
Now this was not at all the way she meant to meet him, nor these the words they meant to use--or rather, she--for John Penhallow had given it no thought, except to be glad as a child promised a gift and then embarrassed into a word of simple descriptive admiration. When John Penhallow said, with a curious gravity and a little of his old formal manner, "I will reflect on it," she knew with the quick perception of her sex that here was a new masculine study for the great naturalist woman. The boy--the lad--she knew were no more.
"Who is that with Uncle James?" she asked.
"My niece, Miss Grey. Colonel Beauregard, my dear. Let us walk up to the Point." The Commandant, who made good his name, took possession of the delighted young woman and carried her away to his home with Penhallow, leaving the cadet to return to his routine of duty. As they parted, he said, "I am set free to-morrow, Leila, at five, and excused from the afternoon parade. If you and Uncle Jim will walk up to Port Putnam, I will join you."
"I will tell Uncle Jim. You will be at the hop of course? I have been thinking of nothing else for a week."
"We are in the midst of our examinations. Even to get time for a walk with you and uncle was hard. I wrote Uncle Jim not to come now. He must have missed it."
"I doubt the anguish," he returned, laughing, as he touched his cap, and left her to brief consideration of the cadet cousin.
"Uncle Jim might have been just like that--looked like that. They are very unlike too. I used to be able to tell just what Jack would do when we were children--don't think I can now. How tall he is and how handsome. The uniform is becoming. I wonder if I too am so greatly changed."
It is well here to betray the secrets of the novelists' confessional. Leila Grey had seen in the South much of an interesting society where love affairs were brief, lightly taken, easily ended, or hardly more than the mid-air flirtations of butterflies. No such perilous approaches to the most intimate relations of men and women were for this young woman, on whom the love and tactful friendship of the married life of Grey Pine had left a lasting impression. One must have known her well to become aware of the sense of duty to her ideals which lay behind her alert appearance of joyous gaiety and capacity to see the mirthful aspects of life. Once long ago the lad's moment of passionate longing had but lightly stirred the dreamless sleep of unawakened power to love. Even the memory of John's boy-folly had faded with time. Her relation to him had been little more than warm friendship. Even that tie--and she was abruptly aware of it--had become less close. She was directly conscious of the fact and wondered if this grave young man felt as she did. She lay awake that night and wondered too if his ideals of heroism and ambition were still actively present, and where too was his imagination--ever on the wing and far beyond her mental flight? She also had changed. Did he know it or care? Then she dismissed him and fell asleep.