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“Nan, my child, I apprehend that remarks upon the characteristics of the officers at the Point had best be confined to the bosom of the family. We may be in their very midst.”

She turns, flushing, and for the first time her blue eyes meet the dark ones of the older girl. Her cheeks redden still more, and she whirls about again.

“I can’t help it, Uncle Jack,” she murmurs. “I’d just like to tell them all what I think of Will’s troubles.”

“Oh! Candor is to be admired of all things,” says Uncle Jack, airily. “Still it is just as well to observe the old adage, ‘Be sure you’re right,’ etc. Now I own to being rather fond of Bill, despite all the worry he has given your mother, and all the bother he has been to me—-“

“All the worry that others have given him, you ought to say, Uncle Jack.”

“W-e-ll, har-d-ly. It didn’t seem to me that the corps, as a rule, thought Billy the victim of persecution.”

“They all tell me so, at least,” is the indignant outburst.

“Do they, Nan? Well, of course, that settles it. Still, there were a few who reluctantly admitted having other views when I pressed them closely.”

“Then they were no friends of Willy’s, or mine either!”

“Now, do you know, I thought just the other way? I thought one of them, especially, a very stanch friend of Billy’s and yours, too, Nan, but Billy seems to consider advisers in the light of adversaries.”

A moment’s pause. Then, with cheeks still red, and plucking at the rope netting with nervous fingers, Miss Nan essays a tentative. Her eyes are downcast as she asks,–

“I suppose you mean Mr. Stanley?”

“The very man, Nanette; very much of a man to my thinking.”

The bronzed soldier standing near cannot but have heard the name and the words. His face takes on a glow and the black eyes kindle.

“Mr. Stanley would not say to me that Willy is to blame,” pouts the maiden, and her little foot is beating impatiently tattoo on the deck.

“Neither would I–just now–if I were Mr. Stanley; but all the same, he decidedly opposed the view that Mr. Lee was ‘down on Billy,’ as your mother seems to think.”

“That’s because Mr. Lee is tactical officer commanding the company, and Mr. Stanley is cadet captain. Oh! I will take him to task if he has been–been—-“

But she does not finish. She has turned quickly in speaking, her hand clutching a little knot of bell buttons hanging by a chain at the front of her dress. She has turned just in time to catch a warning glance in Uncle Jack’s twinkling eyes, and to see a grim smile lurking under the gray moustache of the gentleman with the Loyal Legion button who is leading away the tall young lady with the dark hair. In another moment they have rejoined the third member of their party,–he who first withdrew,–and it is evident that something has happened which gives them all much amusement. They are chatting eagerly together, laughing not a little, although the laughter, like their words, is entirely inaudible to Miss Nan. But she feels a twinge of indignation when the tall girl turns and looks directly at her. There is nothing unkindly in the glance. There even is merriment in the dark, handsome eyes and lurking among the dimples around that beautiful mouth. Why did those eyes–so heavily fringed, so thickly shaded–seem to her familiar as old friends? Nan could have vowed she had somewhere met that girl before, and now that girl was laughing at her. Not rudely, not aggressively, to be sure,–she had turned away again the instant she saw that the little maiden’s eyes were upon her,–but all the same, said Nan to herself, she was laughing. They were all laughing, and it must have been because of her outspoken defence of Brother Will and equally outspoken defiance of his persecutors. What made it worse was that Uncle Jack was laughing too.