"But she didn't turn any of them loose. She kept them all about her while she drew me into the middle of them. But poor me! I'd had no service at all in the civilized ports and hadn't seen more than a dozen white women in the whole two years I'd been gone, and of that dozen had spoken to only three, while as for these artillery chaps--! They made me feel like a six-pound shell in a big turret magazine. Any one of them could talk the eye out of my head the best day I'd ever seen. And the day I came back to her wasn't the best day I'd ever seen--not for talking purposes. I looked at and listened to them, and kept saying to myself: 'I wonder if they realize what a lucky lot they are to be able to stay all the time around where civilized women live?' But I don't believe they did. They took everything as if 'twas no more than small-arms ammunition was being served out to them. "In my room in the hotel that night I began to chart a few new courses for myself. Before I left for the East Doris was terribly young and there'd been no other war heroes hanging around. She and her mother were then living in a quiet hotel near my house while her father was off on some board mission in the West. But now it wasn't any isolated little country hotel. It was post quarters, with her father the commandant, and a parade of young army officers in and out of those quarters, with squadrons of two and three-stripers steaming over pretty regularly from the navy-yard across the bay. And she was two years older--a terrible advance, eighteen to twenty, and I'd been two years gone. "You said a while ago, Carlin, 'What a kid you are!' and perhaps I am, though I think I'm an old, old party myself; but about the time I came back from the East that first time I must have been a good deal of a kid. I know now I was. That first night at the hotel, after I'd been to the fort all day, I talked to myself in good shape. And I wound up by saying: 'Well, what do you care? There are forty nice girls between this hotel and the post.' But there weren't forty. There were a hundred, as far as that went, but there was only one that I wanted to see coming over the side of my ship, and next day when I went to see that one again I set out to win her. And I'm not going to give you any history of the courtship of Doris. I couldn't tell it right if I wanted to, and I don't want to--it's our own private story, but she wasn't trifling when she told me she'd never forget me before I went East. In a week it all came back, and once more we were walking under tall pines and sailing in a beautiful bay. In another week it was as when I left her--I had hopes.