What time he was not walking the deck, with her little hand resting on his arm, or flung in long, low steamer chair close to hers, where he could watch the wondrous beauty of her face and feel the spell of her soft, languorous, lovely eyes, Dwight found himself in converse with her father, a patriotic quartermaster, the owner of valuable properties in the Lone Star State, to which he must speedily return--his "boys," two nephews, were not trained to business, said he, and they, too, had been seeing service and unsettling their minds and habits with the volunteers that didn't get to Cuba. His daughter was his chief anxiety, he admitted. She had her mother's luxurious Spanish temperament; needed a guiding hand--a husband to whom she could look up with respect and honor, not a callow youngster with no ideas beyond scheming for promotion and better pay. Several of these young chaps had been buzzing about her at Manila, but she had "turned them all down," said Farrell. She had sense and power of observation with all her possibly romantic admiration for soldiers, but what she really admired was the real soldier--a man fit to command and lead, a man with a record behind him, not an uncertainty ahead. Dwight's seat, at the request of the veteran general officer going with them to the States, had been at the captain's table, but Dwight soon effected--at least Farrell effected and Dwight got the _dis_credit of it--a transfer with the officer who had been seated at the side of Inez Farrell, and Dwight's mental condition can perhaps be judged of by the fact that he never noticed that General Hume thereafter not once addressed him on the voyage. Enough said. Oswald Dwight's many friends throughout the service read with much surprise, most of them with vague disquietude and some few with downright dismay, the announcement of the marriage at Los Angeles, by the Right Reverend the Bishop of the Diocese, assisted by the Very Reverend Fathers Moran and Finley, at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, of Inez, only daughter of Major and Quartermaster James O'Donohue Farrell, U. S. V., of Santa Rosita, Texas, and Maria Mercedes de la Cruz y Mendoza y Fronteras, his wife, to Captain Oswald M. Dwight, --th U. S. Cavalry.