“He did, however.  By manner and in speech I purposely and deliberately insulted him.  You’ll tell him every word of this, of course, and he’ll laugh at it, but I give myself the pleasure of telling you.  I put the proposition of an `investment’ to him in a way nobody not a crook would have allowed to be smoothed over—­and he allowed it to be smoothed over.  He ate it!  I felt he was a swindler when he was showing Richard Lindley his maps and papers, and now I’ve proved it to myself, and it’s worth the price.”  Often, when they had danced, and often during this interview, his eyes lifted curiously to the white flaming crescent in her hair; now they fixed themselves upon it, and in a flash of divination he cried:  “You wear it for me!”

She did not understand.  “Finished raving?” she inquired.

“I gave Corliss a thousand dollars,” he said, slowly.  “Considering the fact that it was my last, I flatter myself it was not unhandsomely done—­though I may never need it.  It has struck me that the sum was about what a man who had just cleaned up fifty thousand might regard as a sort of `extra’—­`for lagniappe’—­and that he might have thought it an appropriate amount to invest in a present some jewels perhaps—­to place in the hair of a pretty friend!”

She sprang to her feet, furious, but he stood in front of her and was able to bar the way for a moment.

“Cora, I’ll have a last word with you if I have to hold you,” he said with great rapidity and in a voice which shook with the intense repression he was putting upon himself.  “We do one thing in the South, where I came from.  We protect our women——­”

“This looks like it!  Keeping me when——­”

“I love you,” he said, his face whiter than she had ever seen it.  “I love you!  I’m your dog!  You take care of yourself if you want to take care of anybody else!  As sure as——­”

“My dance, Miss Madison.”  A young gentleman on vacation from the navy had approached, and, with perfect unconsciousness of what he was interrupting, but with well-founded certainty that he was welcome to the lady, urged his claim in a confident voice.  “I thought it would never come, you know; but it’s here at last and so am I.”  He laughed propitiatingly.

Ray yielded now at once.  She moved him aside with her gloved forearm as if he were merely an awkward stranger who unwittingly stood between her and the claiming partner.  Carrying the gesture farther, she took the latter’s arm, and smilingly, and without a backward glance, passed onward and left the gallery.  The lieutenant, who had met her once or twice before, was her partner for the succeeding dance as well, and, having noted the advantages of the place where he had discovered her, persuaded her to return there to sit through the second.  Then without any fatiguing preamble, he proposed marriage.  Cora did not accept, but effected a compromise, which, for the present, was to consist of an exchange of photographs (his to be in uniform) and letters.