The very next morning Broussard began his open attentions to the Colonel and his secret wooing of Anita.  He had plenty of opportunities for both.  It was easy enough to see Anita every day.  Often they rode together in the gay riding parties that were among the constant amusements of the young things at the post.  Then, there was the weekly dance in the great ball-room and many little dances and dinners, and Broussard always contrived to be with Anita the best part of the evening.  He was always willing to sing and Anita was always ready to play the violin obligatos for him.  Broussard developed wonderful knowledge of song birds and entirely abandoned game chickens, and was astonishingly regular in his attendance at the chapel, which induced Anita to think him a model of Christian piety.  If Broussard had been a conceited man he would have seen that Anita’s heart was his long before he asked for it; but being a modest fellow and thinking Anita was but a little lower than the angels, Broussard paid her the delicate and tender court which women love so well.

The regimen of love and leisure did wonders for Broussard.  His thin face filled up, his color returned, he was soon able to dance and ride and shoot with the best of his comrades.  He did not forget the man in the military prison or the wife that watched and waited and prayed and hoped.  But there was reason to hope:  Lawrence was, from the beginning, a model prisoner, and the chaplain, who had lost, in the course of years, some of his confidence in repentance, began once more to believe that it was possible to regenerate a man’s soul.  Most prisoners are a trifle too ready to accept the theory of the forgiveness of sins.  Not so Lawrence.  Often, he had paroxysms of despair, accusing himself wildly and doubting whether the good God could forgive so evil a sinner as he.  Sometimes, he would refuse to see his wife, declaring he was not fit for her to speak to; again, he would weep and ask for a sight of his child, now far away and in good hands.  All these things, and more, the chaplain knew, from long experience, meant that Lawrence’s soul was struggling toward the light.  Regularly Broussard went to see him at the prison and the two men, the high-minded officer and the disgraced private, were drawn together by the secret bond between them.  Often, they talked in whispers of their dead mother and Broussard would say to Lawrence: 

“Our mother’s spirit and your wife’s love ought to save you.”

Another visitor Lawrence had was Sergeant McGillicuddy.  The Sergeant’s merciful soul could not accept the chaplain’s theory that the blow provoked by McGillicuddy had been Lawrence’s salvation.

“I never knew a man who was helped by being a deserter, sir,” was the Sergeant’s answer to the chaplain’s kindly sophism, “but Lawrence is a penitent man—­that I see with my own eyes.  I don’t need no chaplain to tell me that, sir.”

Meanwhile, Broussard kept up a steady courtship of Colonel Fortescue.  Whatever views the Colonel advanced, Broussard promptly endorsed.  He gave up cock fighting, motors, superfluous clothes and high-priced horses, and, if his word could be taken for it, he had adopted Spartan tastes and meant to stick to them.  Colonel Fortescue rated Broussard’s newly-acquired taste for the simple life at its true value, and was sometimes a trifle sardonic over it.