But when his duties were completed with the twenty-eighth of August and he should have gone to his home, Loring remained at the Point fascinated, for Miss Haight and her musical companion stayed at Cozzens through September. In October they were to go to Lenox, and before the parting Loring's ring was on that little finger. She had promised to be his wife. Home then he hurried in response to the pleading of his sister, but the moment the Lenox visit was over and Miss Haight returned to New York thither went Loring to find his _fiancee_ at the piano, with a middle-aged, somewhat portly civilian bending eagerly over her and so engrossed that he never saw or heard the intruder. This was November fourth. The engagement was barely six weeks old, but Loring's ring was not on her finger as she rose in confusion to greet him. More than that, she wrote a piteous letter to him, begging for her release. She "really had not known her own mind." Loring gave it without a word to or without other sight of her, packed his trunk, and left New York on the morning train. There was a sensation at the Point when it was announced that Miss Allyn was to marry Mr. Forbes Crosby, a wealthy "board-of-trade man" of forty. Loring reappeared no more. He got his orders for San Francisco and sailed late in the fall, and barely had he gone than the story spread from lip to lip that Mr. Crosby had broken the engagement, that Miss Haight had decided to go abroad and would not require a companion what was more, that Forbes Crosby had been making very judicious investments for Miss Haight herself, and people really wouldn't be surprised if--and then Geraldine Allyn, too, disappeared from New York and was next heard of living very quietly with a married sister, herself an invalid, a Mrs. Nevins, whose husband was said to be somewhere in the army. And so that girl whom Loring had so deeply loved was sister to the wife of this military castaway, this unprincipled gambler, swindler and thief, and he, Loring, had charged himself with a commission that might bring him once more face to face with her who had duped him. Circling the camp at wide distance, he had crossed the _acequia_ and reached the Gila road. To the north now lay the camp, and the twinkling lights of the sutler's bar, and between him and these twinkling lights two dark objects bobbed into view some thirty yards distant, and, as plain as he could hear his own heart beat, Loring heard a voice say: "Then I'll count on you not to let him out of your sight," and the voice was that of Nevins--Nevins who was supposed to confine himself, day and night in arrest, to the limits of the garrison. CHAPTER VI.