"Do you? What time? Perhaps I can arrange to take a gallop at the same hour. You've never ridden with me yet." (Reproachfully.) "You will have to ask Mrs. Stannard. Now, Mr. Gleason, I must go back to my desk. Good-morning." And she vanished, sweet and smiling, and he "went off mad," swearing mad. That very afternoon an ambulance arrived from Laramie with Ray. Oh, what a jubilee they had! and how those women fluttered around him as he sat in a low reclining-chair on the piazza of the quarters made ready for him! A young assistant surgeon was with him, whom Ray cajoled and bullied alternately; called him such military pet names as "Pills," "Squills," and "Sawbones" whenever he had occasion to address him; laughed him out of all his feeble protests against "exciting himself," and bade him reserve his ministrations for Blake, who would be in on the morrow. The evening he came, after he had been shaved and bathed and rebandaged, and had his hair trimmed, and had donned a very swell brand-new fatigue uniform, in which he looked remarkably natty and well despite a slight pallor, Ray had insisted on being trundled up the row in a wheeled chair, and there at Mrs. Stannard's they had a little rejoicing of their own,--Ray and the young surgeon being surrounded by the ladies of the --th for an hour, when Mrs. Wilkins had to go off to her brood, Mrs. Turner to visit some infantry friends, and then, awhile longer, Miss Sanford sat and listened to the eager talk of Mrs. Stannard and Grace with the dark-eyed cavalryman, and those dark eyes of his sought hers every other minute. They tried to get him to talk of his ride. Even Grace, declaring that he must, and turning laughingly to her friend, exclaimed,--"Come, Maidie, add your plea. You have a right to know how your colors went;" and Miss Sanford's face flamed with its sudden blush, but she spoke no word. Mrs. Stannard, smiling and happy, but seeing everything as usual, noted that Ray, too, had flushed underneath the deep tan of his frontier complexion, but he came to the rescue blithely as ever. "Ah, Miss Sanford, it would have been easy enough if I had only had Monarchist; though Dandy did nobly, bless him!" It was a blissful evening, and all too short, for the doctor simply ended it by wheeling Ray home at nine o'clock and putting him to bed. For two days more he was incessantly up the row in his wheeled chair. Twice Gleason saw him _tete-a-tete_ with Miss Sanford on the piazza, and the garrison ladies were slyly twitting him with his prospects of being cut out. The whole garrison by this time saw that he and Ray were not on speaking terms. Blake, too, had arrived, a little cross and crabbed for him, as his wounds were painful, consisting mainly of bruises where his wounded horse had fallen and rolled with him. But he could limp about and swear, and distort the poetry of the old masters and be savage and cynical. He hated Gleason, ridiculed him in public, and hailed him as a military Malvolio.