“No, she isn’t; but let me say this, Chester:  that whenever she is ready to return I shall be ready to escort her.”

Chester looked at his friend in amazement, and without speaking.

“Yes, I see you are astonished, but you may as well understand the situation.  I have heard all the colonel could tell, and have even seen the letter, and since she left here a mysterious stranger has appeared by night at Sablon, at the cottage window, though it happened to be her mother’s this time, and I don’t believe Alice Renwick knows the first thing about it.”

“Armitage, are you in love?”

“Chester, I am in my sound senses.  Now come and show me the ladder, and where you found it, and tell me the whole story over again.  I think it grows interesting.  One moment:  has he that picture yet?”

“I suppose so.  I don’t know.  In these last few days everybody is fighting shy of him.  He thinks it is my doing, and looks black and sulky at me, but is too proud or too much afraid of consequences to ask the reason of the cold shoulders and averted looks.  Gray has taken seven days’ leave and gone off with that little girl of his to place her with relatives in the East.  He has heard the stories, and it is presumed that some of the women have told her.  She was down sick here a day or two.”

“Well, now for the window and the ladder.  I want to see the outside through your eyes, and then I will view the interior with my own.  The colonel bids me do so.”

Together they slowly climbed the long stairway leading up the face of the cliff.  Chester stopped for a breathing-spell more than once.

“You’re all out of condition, man,” said the younger captain, pausing impatiently.  “What has undone you?”

“This trouble, and nothing else.  By gad! it has unstrung the whole garrison, I believe.  You never saw our people fall off so in their shooting.  Of course we expected Jerrold to go to pieces, but nobody else.”

“There were others that seemed to fall away, too.  Where was that cavalry-team that was expected to take the skirmish medal away from us?”

“Sound as a dollar, every man, with the single exception of their big sergeant.  I don’t like to make ugly comparisons to a man whom I believe to be more than half interested in a woman, but it makes me think of the old story about Medusa.  One look at her face is too much for a man.  That Sergeant McLeod went to grass the instant he caught sight of her, and never has picked up since.”

“Consider me considerably more than half interested in the woman in this case, Chester:  make all the comparisons that you like, provided they illumine matters as you are doing now, and tell me more of this Sergeant McLeod.  What do you mean by his catching sight of her and going to grass?”

“I mean he fell flat on his face the moment he saw her, and hasn’t been in good form from that moment to this.  The doctor says it’s heart-disease.”