again the scent of the sage-brush and his eyes smarted with alkali dust.  He regretted the desolate prairies, the wide reaches of barrenness accursed of the Creator, the wild chaos of the mountain canons, the horror of the Bad Lands, the tingling cold of winter in the Black Hills.  But the Republic holds so high the privilege of serving her that, for the officer who once resigns—­with a good character—­there is no return forever, though he seek it with half the lobby at his heels.  So Captain Farnham sat, this fine May morning, reading a newspaper which gave the stations of his friends in the “Tenth” with something of the feeling which assails the exile when he cons the court journal where his name shall appear no more.

But while he is looking at the clock a servant enters.

“That same young person is here again.”

“What young person?”

There was a slight flavor of reproach in the tone of the grave Englishman as he answered: 

“I told you last night, sir, she have been here three times already; she doesn’t give me her name nor yet her business; she is settin’ in the drawin’-room, and says she will wait till you are quite at leisure.  I was about to tell her,” he added with still deeper solemnity, “that you were hout, sir, but she hinterrupted of me and said, ’He isn’t gone, there’s his ‘at,’ which I told her you ’ad several ’ats, and would she wait in the drawin’-room and I’d see.”

Captain Farnham smiled.

“Very well, Budsey, you’ve done your best—­and perhaps she won’t eat me after all.  Is there a fire in the drawing-room?”

“No, sir.”

“Let her come in here, then.”

A moment afterward the rustle of a feminine step made Farnham raise his head suddenly from his paper.  It was a quick, elastic step, accompanied by that crisp rattle of drapery which the close clinging garments of ladies produced at that season.  The door opened, and as the visitor entered Farnham rose in surprise.  He had expected to see the usual semi-mendicant, with sad-colored raiment and doleful whine, calling for a subscription for a new “Centennial History,” or the confessed genteel beggar whose rent would be due to-morrow.  But there was nothing in any way usual in the young person who stood before him.  She was a tall and robust girl of eighteen or nineteen, of a singularly fresh and vigorous beauty.  The artists forbid us to look for physical perfection in real people, but it would have been hard for the coolest-headed studio-rat to find any fault in the slender but powerful form of this young woman.  Her color was deficient in delicacy, and her dark hair was too luxuriant to be amenable to the imperfect discipline to which it had been accustomed; but the eye of Andrea, sharpened by criticising Raphael, could hardly have found a line to alter in her.  The dress of that year was scarcely more reticent in its revelations than the first wet cloth with which a sculptor swathes