"I had seen handsome women, and many lovely girls, but never so exquisite a creature as this, and from that moment I lost reason, prudence, everything but conscience, and my heritage of honorable instincts. Nona Moorland was the daughter of a teamster attached to father's command; a brutal, rough man, whose second wife--a selfish, jealous virago--made the step-daughter's life a cruel burden. They occupied a log cabin just outside the Post parade grounds, and the girl was never allowed in sight of drill lines except when under convoy of the stepmother she assisted in carrying to headquarters the freshly laundered clothes of the officers. Having been forbidden, under threat of corporeal punishment, to speak to or be seen with any soldier, save in her father's cabin, she was terrified at the danger of a discovery of our acquaintance; hence our interviews were secret, and adroitly arranged to elude suspicion. Her extraordinary personal beauty and gentleness of deportment more than compensated for illiteracy and humble origin, and after a few days I planned a clandestine marriage, to which she readily assented. The Post chaplain had made a pet of me, because I aided him in some botanical and geological tramps close to the frontier, and finally he consented to help us, provided his agency was never betrayed. We both swore we would not divulge his name or knowledge of our scheme, and so one starry night he and Hill, a private soldier who went as witness, stole out, and met Nona and me in a dense grove of trees near Moorland's cabin. There we were married according to the ritual of the Episcopal Church. I was not quite nineteen, she a slender girl just past her fifteenth birthday. Under the quiet stars that shone as our altar lights, we took solemn, life-long vows as husband and wife, and there, when a written certificate had been given to Nona, we all joined hands and pledged ourselves in the sight of God to keep the secret until I was of age, or thought it prudent to publish the marriage. To her I meant no more wrong than to myself, and kept to the form of law, knowing we were minors, and that no license legalized the ceremony which I believed and argued the Church sanctified. You knew my father sufficiently well to remember how terribly stern he was, how morose he often seemed, and I dared not defy him. For three weeks life was a brief vision of heaven to Nona and me. She was so lovely, so tender, so humbly conscious of her social inferiority and lack of education, so fired with an ambitious zeal for culture and improvement to fit herself for the circle where Colonel Temple's son was born to move. Then the bolt fell. A courier from the nearest telegraph station brought news that father had been promoted, was ordered to Washington, and would soon go abroad on some military commission. I begged to spend the remaining days of my vacation at Post ----, but was sharply refused, and all things were ordered in readiness for our departure next day at