“Excuse me, captain, I shall be engaged all morning,” answered Mr. Hayne, and walked on down the row.  Nearly all the officers were strolling away in groups of three or four.  Hayne walked past them all with quick, soldierly step and almost aggressive manner, and was soon far ahead, all by himself.  Finding it an unprofitable subject, there had been little talk between the two regiments as to what Mr. Hayne’s status should be on his reappearance.  Everybody heard that he had somewhat rudely spurned the advances of Ross and his companions.  Indeed, Ross had told the story with strong coloring to more than half the denizens of officers’ row.  Evidently he desired no further friendship or intercourse with his brother blue-straps; and only a few of the cavalry officers found his society attractive.  He played delightfully; he was well read; but in general talk he was not entertaining.  “Altogether too sepulchral,—­or at least funereal,” explained the cavalry.  “He never laughs, and rarely smiles, and he’s as glum as a Quaker meeting,” was another complaint.  So a social success was hardly to be predicted for Mr. Hayne.

While he could not be invited where just a few infantry people were the other guests, from a big general gathering or party he, of course, could not be omitted; but there he would have his cavalry and medical friends to talk to, and then there was Major Waldron.  It was a grievous pity that there should be such an element of embarrassment, but it couldn’t be helped.  As the regimental adjutant had said, Hayne himself was the main obstacle to his restoration to regimental friendship.  No man who piques himself on the belief that he is about to do a virtuous and praiseworthy act will be apt to persevere when the object of his benevolence treats him with cold contempt.  If Mr. Hayne saw fit to repudiate the civilities a few officers essayed to extend to him, no others would subject themselves to similar rebuffs; and if he could stand the status quo, why, the regiment could; and that, said the Riflers, was the end of the matter.

But it was not the end, by a good deal.  Some few of the ladies of the infantry, actuated by Mrs. Rayner’s vehement exposition of the case, had aligned themselves on her side as against the post commander, and by their general conduct sought to convey to the colonel and to the ladies who were present at the first dinner given Mr. Hayne thorough disapproval of their course.  This put the cavalry people on their mettle and led to a division in the garrison; and as Major Waldron was, in Mrs. Rayner’s eyes, equally culpable with the colonel, it so resulted that two or three infantry households, together with some unmarried subalterns, were arrayed socially against their own battalion commander as well as against the grand panjandrum at post head-quarters.  If it had not been for the determined attitude of Mr. Hayne himself, the garrison might speedily have been resolved into two parties,—­Hayne and anti-Hayne