“Is your problem, not mine.”

“Then Lucile—?”

“Certainly not.  She played a quixotic little game of her own and botched it beautifully.”

“I—­I do not understand.”  Corliss brushed his brows in a dazed sort of way.

Trethaway parted his lips in a superior smile.  “It is not necessary that you should.  The question is, Will you stand up with me?”

“Surely.  But what a confoundedly long way around you took.  It is not your usual method.”

“Nor was it with her,” the colonel declared, twisting his moustache proudly.

A captain of the North-West Mounted Police, by virtue of his magisterial office, may perform marriages in time of stress as well as execute exemplary justice.  So Captain Alexander received a call from Colonel Trethaway, and after he left jotted down an engagement for the next morning.  Then the impending groom went to see Frona.  Lucile did not make the request, he hastened to explain, but—­well, the fact was she did not know any women, and, furthermore, he (the colonel) knew whom Lucile would like to ask, did she dare.  So he did it upon his own responsibility.  And coming as a surprise, he knew it would be a great joy to her.

Frona was taken aback by the suddenness of it.  Only the other day, it was, that Lucile had made a plea to her for St. Vincent, and now it was Colonel Trethaway!  True, there had been a false quantity somewhere, but now it seemed doubly false.  Could it be, after all, that Lucile was mercenary?  These thoughts crowded upon her swiftly, with the colonel anxiously watching her face the while.  She knew she must answer quickly, yet was distracted by an involuntary admiration for his bravery.  So she followed, perforce, the lead of her heart, and consented.

Yet the whole thing was rather strained when the four of them came together, next day, in Captain Alexander’s private office.  There was a gloomy chill about it.  Lucile seemed ready to cry, and showed a repressed perturbation quite unexpected of her; while, try as she would, Frona could not call upon her usual sympathy to drive away the coldness which obtruded intangibly between them.  This, in turn, had a consequent effect on Vance, and gave a certain distance to his manner which forced him out of touch even with the colonel.

Colonel Trethaway seemed to have thrown twenty years off his erect shoulders, and the discrepancy in the match which Frona had felt vanished as she looked at him.  “He has lived the years well,” she thought, and prompted mysteriously, almost with vague apprehension she turned her eyes to Corliss.  But if the groom had thrown off twenty years, Vance was not a whit behind.  Since their last meeting he had sacrificed his brown moustache to the frost, and his smooth face, smitten with health and vigor, looked uncommonly boyish; and yet, withal, the naked upper lip advertised a stiffness and resolution hitherto concealed.  Furthermore, his features portrayed a growth, and his eyes, which had been softly firm, were now firm with the added harshness or hardness which is bred of coping with things and coping quickly,—­the stamp of executiveness which is pressed upon men who do, and upon all men who do, whether they drive dogs, buck the sea, or dictate the policies of empires.