The order reached Alvarado late in the afternoon, and the batteries were to leave by train at four o'clock the next morning. As it happened, Kitty Main, Father, Di, and I were all invited to a dance that evening at the house of an officer and his wife, Captain and Mrs. Kilburn; but when the news about the batteries going away began to flash from cottage to cottage we expected the party to be given up. Di looked rather blank when Mrs. Main flung the tidings at her, for Sidney Vandyke hadn't proposed yet. If the dance were abandoned, he might be too busy getting his men ready to see her before he left; and heaven alone knew when the batteries would come back. There might be fighting; there might at worst even be war with Mexico; and whatever happened, we couldn't stay on indefinitely at Alvarado. Kitty Main had taken the cottage and asked us to visit her only for six weeks. Besides, Alvarado would be desolate without our best friends and possible lovers. I could see these thoughts developing and following on one another's heels in Diana's mind. But in my head there was nothing concrete enough to call a "thought." Feelings seemed to have raced upstairs from heart to brain, and driven ideas out of the house. They ran wildly round and round, saying to each other, "What if I never see him again? What if he should be killed?" But while we were in this state, Mrs. Kilburn telephoned to Kitty Main that she had decided to have her dance in spite of all. Her husband was not among those ordered away, and the officers who were going had arranged to spare time to look in for three or four dances in any case. Some of them might be very early, some very late, but there would be plenty of other men to go round; and Mrs. Kilburn suggested that we might "keep things up" long enough to see the soldiers off at dawn, before motoring back to the Springs, if that would interest Lady Diana and Lady Peggy O'Malley. There was only one answer to this, and when we went over to Fort Alvarado for the dance we put on warmer cloaks than we should have worn ordinarily. Mrs. Kilburn had brought her husband money; and as she loved gayety she had somehow got permission to build on to the captain's quarters a ballroom surrounded on three sides by a wide veranda. Consequently, a dance at the Kilburns' was worth going to always, and particularly on this moonlight night of April when the whole fort was humming with excitement. The officers who were ordered away had their hands full of work, yet the young ones managed to get off duty if only for a few minutes, long enough to snatch a dance or two with the girls they liked best, or to "sit out" with them on the veranda, where there were colonies of chairs, and garden seats, and hammocks.