I felt myself go scarlet. What a good thing one doesn't blush all colours of the rainbow!--for I had the sensation of a prism. "Tony Dalziel may be lucky," I stammered. "I hope he is. But his luck has nothing to do with me. Neither has he--except as a friend. That's quite understood between us." "Oh, is it?" smiled Eagle. "I'm a selfish beast to be glad, but I am. I was feeling quite low in my mind and 'out of it' at dinner." So the wistful looks had been for me! It seemed too good to be true, even to have so much place in Eagle's heart that he didn't want to lose me. When Milly turned to him, as she did almost instantly, for consolation after Major Vandyke's teasing, Eagle told her, while I listened, how very little, in his opinion, there was for any one to fear. It was true, of course, that the troops had come to El Paso for a purpose. Every one thought it had been served by frightening out of a certain faction of Mexicans such vague, secret hopes as they might foolishly have cherished. Now to be sure, the "scare act" was being read again, but the big field guns pointing across the river were in any case powerful enough to keep the peace. Captain March wanted to know if we would care to visit the camps next day. If so, he would help Dalziel arrange the visit. This suggestion saved Milly the trouble of hinting for it, and she was happy; but her happiness was destined to be short-lived. It was destroyed in the night by a band of vicious microbes with which she had been fighting a silent battle during the long journey to El Paso. They won, and kept her in bed with a pink nose and eyes overflowing with grief and influenza. I nobly offered to stay with her, but Mrs. Dalziel had a son as well as a daughter. She said we must go and take a look at Tony's tent, if we did nothing else; and perhaps it would have ended in our doing not much more if it hadn't been for Eagle.