and laughed at the howling wind.  The bare grimy walls and the dim kerosene lamp, even Sam’s unmelodious snore in the back room, sent no gloom to his soul.  It had been a happy evening.  It had cost him a hard struggle to restrain the emotion which he had felt at times; and when he withdrew, soon after the trumpets sounded tattoo, and the ladies fell to discussing him, as women will, there was but one verdict,—­his manners were perfect.

But the colonel said more than that.  He had found him far better read than any other officer of his age he had ever met; and one and all they expressed the hope that they might see him frequently.  No wonder it was of momentous importance to him.  It was the opening to a new life.  It meant that here at least he had met soldiers and gentlemen and their fair and gracious wives who had welcomed him to their homes, and, though they must have known that a pall of suspicion and crime had overshadowed his past, they believed either that he was innocent of the grievous charge or that his years of exile and suffering had amply atoned.  It was a happy evening indeed to him; but there was gloom at Captain Rayner’s.

The captain himself had gone out soon after tattoo.  He found that the parlor was filled with young visitors of both sexes, and he was in no mood for merriment.  Miss Travers was being welcomed to the post in genuine army style, and was evidently enjoying it.  Mrs. Rayner was flitting nervously in and out of the parlor with a cloud upon her brow, and for once in her life compelled to preserve temporary silence upon the subject uppermost in her thoughts.  She had been forbidden to speak of it to her husband; yet she knew he had gone out again with every probability of needing some one to talk to about the matter.  She could not well broach the topic in the parlor, because she was not at all sure how Captain and Mrs. Gregg of the cavalry would take it; and they were still there.  She was a loyal wife; her husband’s quarrel was hers, and more too; and she was a woman of intuition even keener than that which we so readily accord the sex.  She knew, and knew well, that a hideous doubt had been preying for a long time in her husband’s heart of hearts, and she knew still better that it would crush him to believe it was even suspected by any one else.  Right or wrong, the one thing for her to do, she doubted not, was to maintain the original guilt against all comers, and to lose no opportunity of feeding the flame that consumed Mr. Hayne’s record and reputation.  He was guilty,—­he must be guilty; and though she was a Christian according to her view of the case,—­a pillar of the Church in matters of public charity and picturesque conformity to all the rubric called for in the services, and much that it did not,—­she was unrelenting in her condemnation of Mr. Hayne.  To those who pointed out that he had made every atonement man could make, she responded with the severity of conscious virtue that there could be no atonement without repentance,