“Oh, come now,” he interrupted, laughing, but with a little suspicious moisture in eyes as blue as her own; “it will be harder for you to stay and think of absent friends than for them to go.  I foresee how it will turn out.  You will be imagining high tragedy on stormy nights when we shall be having a jolly game of poker.  Good-night.  I shall be absent for a time,—­going to West Point to be coached a little by my friend Captain Varrum.”

He drew himself up, saluted her a la militaire, right-about-faced with the stiffness of a ramrod, and was departing, when a light hand touched his arm, and Marian said, with a look so kind and sympathetic that his eyes fell before it:  “Report to me occasionally, Captain Strahan.  There are my colors;” and she gave him a white rose from her belt.

His mouth quivered slightly, but with a rather faltering laugh he replied, as he put the rose to his lips, “Never let the color suggest that I will show the white feather;” and then he began his military career with a precipitate retreat.

CHAPTER VIII.

Charmed by A critic.

“What next?” was Marian’s wondering query after Mr. Strahan’s departure.  The change of motive which already had had no slight influence on her own action and feeling had apparently ushered in a new era in her experience; but the sense of novelty in personal affairs was quite lost as she contemplated the transformation in the mercurial Strahan, who had apparently been an irredeemable fop.  That the fastidious exquisite should tramp through Virginia mud, and face a battery of hostile cannon, appeared to her the most marvellous of human paradoxes.  An hour before she would have declared the idea preposterous.  Now she was certain he would do all that he had said, and would do it in the manner satirical and deprecatory towards himself which she had suggested.

Radical as the change seemed, she saw that it was a natural one as he had explained it.  If there was any manhood in him the times would evoke it.  After all, his chief faults had been youth and a nature keenly sensitive to certain social influences.  Belonging to a wealthy and fashionable clique in the city, he had early been impressed by the estimated importance of dress and gossip.  To excel in these, therefore, was to become pre-eminent.  As time passed, however, the truth, never learned by some, that his clique was not the world, began to dawn on him.  He was foolish, but not a fool; and when he saw young fellows no older than himself going to the front, when he read of their achievements and sufferings, he drew comparisons.  The result was that he became more and more dissatisfied.  He felt that he was anomalous, in respect not only to the rural scenery of his summer home, but to the times, and the conviction was growing that the only way to right himself was to follow the host of American youth who had gone southward.  It was a conviction to