"Who? Frank Garrison? Heavens! I haven't known what it was to have a husband--since that poor dear boy went on staff duty," promptly answered the diminutive center of attraction, a merry peal of laughter ringing under the dingy archway of the long, long roof. "Why, the Portland has only one stateroom in it big enough for a bandbox, and of course the General has to have that, and there isn't a deck where one couple could turn a slow waltz. No, indeed! wait for the next flotilla, when _our_ fellows go, bands and all. _Then_ we'll see." "But surely, Mrs. Garrison, we are told the War Department has positively forbidden officers' wives from going on the transports"--again began her interrogator, a wistful look in her tired eyes. "I know I'd give _anything_ to join Mr. Dutton." "The War Department has to take orders quite as often as it gives them, Mrs. Dutton. The thing is to know how to be of the order-giving side. Oh, joy!" she suddenly cried. "Here are the Primes and Amy Lawrence--then the regiments must be coming! And there's Stanley Armstrong!" Far up the westward street the distant roar of voices mingled with the swing and rhythm and crash of martial music. Dock policemen and soldiers on guard began boring a wide lane through the throng of people on the pier. A huge black transport ship lay moored along the opposite side to that on which the guns and troopers were embarked, and for hours bales, boxes and barrels had been swallowed up and stored in her capacious depths until now, over against the tables of the Red Cross, there lay behind a rope barrier, taut stretched and guarded by a line of sentries, an open space close under the side of the greater steamer and between the two landing stages, placed fore and aft. By this time the north side of the broad pier was littered with the inevitable relics of open air lunching, and though busy hands had been at work and the tables had been cleared, and fresh white cloths were spread and everything _on_ the tables began again to look fair and inviting, the good fairies themselves looked askance at their bestrewn surroundings. "Oh, if we could only move everything bodily over to the other side," wailed Madam President, as from her perch on a stack of Red Cross boxes she surveyed that coveted stretch of clean, unhampered flooring. "And why not?" chirruped Mrs. Garrison, from a similar perch, a tier or two higher. "Here are men enough to move mountains. All we have to do is to say the word." "Ah, but it isn't," replied the other, gazing wistfully about over the throng of faces, as though in search of some one sufficient in rank and authority to serve her purpose. "We plead in vain with the officer-of-the-guard. He says his orders are imperative--to allow no one to intrude on that space," and madam looked as though she would rather look anywhere than at the animated sprite above her.