I had been tremendously interested in the whole trip from Washington to Arizona, and with the first glimpse I had of the romantic Springs I felt a thrilling sensation that it was a place where things were bound to happen. The hotel, as all who have heard of Alvarado must know, stands in the midst of a young forest, overlooking a canon that for colour is like a vast cup full of rainbows, and beyond the forest to the left is the garrison. From the higher stories of the hotel you can see the red roofs of the officers' quarters, and farther away the barracks and the big, bare drill ground, but from the wide verandas no houses are anywhere visible, except the colony of cottages built in Spanish fashion like the hotel itself, each having its own little garden with a flowery hedge. From the glorified cottage Mrs. Main had taken we could walk up to a dance at the hotel in five minutes. I think Eagle would have liked to meet us at the railway station, but Di had plenty of excuses for not allowing that. He had met Mrs. Main, however, and in the afternoon he called. Father was out prospering round the little town, and visiting the smart club at which he had been put up as an honorary member. Di and our hostess (she made us call her Kitty, a sprightly name to which she struggled to live up to) were in the garden when Eagle came, but I happened to be in the drawing-room with a book, so I had about five minutes alone with him before Mrs. Main's black butler found the others. I hadn't tried, as a well-regulated young girl would no doubt have tried, to "get over" being in love with Captain March. I had just simply said to myself that the kind of unhappiness which loving him made me suffer was better than any little wretched pretence at half-baked happiness I could hope for by putting him out of my mind. So I had basked in the painful luxury of thinking about him constantly, and dreaming dreams of how I might serve or sacrifice myself for him, and win his passionate gratitude. Consequently, when I raised my eyes from the Spanish novel I wanted to translate, and saw Eagle March come in at the door, I loved him a thousand times more than ever. I don't know if an unprejudiced person would call him actually handsome; but I thought there couldn't be on earth a man worth comparing with that brown-faced soldier.