He stopped, lighted a cigar, and walked briskly homeward.  As he passed by the Belding cottage, he saw that the lower story was in darkness, and in the windows above the light was glowing behind the shades.

“So Furrey is gone, and the tired young traveller is going early to rest.”

He went into his library and sat down by the dying embers of the grate.  His mind had been full of Alice and her prospects during his long walk in the moonlight; and now as he sat there, the image of Maud Matchin suddenly obtruded itself upon him, and he began to compare and contrast the two girls, both so beautiful and so utterly unlike; and then his thoughts shifted all at once back to his own early life.  He thought of his childhood, of his parents removed from him so early that their memory was scarcely more than a dream; he wondered what life would have been to him if they had been spared.  Then his school-days came up before him; his journey to France with his grandfather; his studies at St. Cyr; his return to America during the great war, his enlistment as a private in the regular cavalry, his promotion to a lieutenancy three days afterward, his service through the terrible campaign of the Peninsula, his wounds at Gettysburg, and at last the grand review of the veterans in front of the White House when the war was over.

But this swift and brilliant panorama did not long delay his musing fancy.  A dull smart like that of a healing wound drew his mind to a succession of scenes on the frontier.  He dwelt with that strange fascination which belongs to the memory of hardships—­and which we are all too apt to mistake for regret—­upon his life of toil and danger in the wide desolation of the West.  There he met, one horrible winter, the sister-in-law of a brother captain, a tall, languid, ill-nourished girl of mature years, with tender blue eyes and a taste for Byron.  She had no home and no relatives in the world except her sister, Mrs. Keefe, whom she had followed into the wilderness.  She was a heavy burden on the scanty resources of poor Keefe, but he made her cordially welcome like the hearty soldier that he was.  She was the only unmarried white woman within a hundred miles, and the mercury ranged from zero to -20 degrees all winter.  In the spring, she and Farnham were married; he seemed to have lost the sense of there being any other women in the world, and he took her, as one instinctively takes to dinner the last lady remaining in a drawing-room, without special orders.  He had had the consolation of reflecting that he made her perfectly proud and happy every day of her life that was left.  Before the autumn ended, she died, on a forced march one day, when the air was glittering with alkali, and the fierce sun seemed to wither the dismal plain like the vengeance of heaven.  Though Farnham was even then one of the richest men in the army, so rigid are the rules imposed upon our service, by the economy of an ignorant demagogy, that no transportation could