“I should say _not_,” chuckled Fredericks, pleased with the possibilities of his own idea, “not when you can offer her an existence which is a breathing enactment of all for which the Sunday supplements are read. ‘My dear, allow me to present my esteemed confrère of the colored page, _Dippy Dick_, Mrs. Swinnerton. And _this_ is _Little Nemo_.’” The anger was leaving Swinnerton’s red face. These men did not believe him, and only because he was he. His twinkling eyes dulled, his round mouth straightened. He rose, and something in his drooping attitude arrested Fredericks. “I was only going to say,” he began a little sadly, “that to you, of all the men I love to call my friends, I wished first to tell my great happiness. I am going to marry Mary Smith.” Indignation tinged his later words and indignation straightened his shoulders as he turned and walked with an unintended burlesque of dignity from the room. For Gallipoli had laughed again. “What’s he trying to put over?” asked Fredericks, puzzled. “Well, I don’t know,” confessed Merton, “but I think that even Swinney shouldn’t inject the names of ladies into his buffooneries.” In his own berth, Swinnerton, fully dressed, sat rigidly staring at his hands, his face hard and expressionless. He was considering a new need that had come to him. “Only for her,” he was saying, “I’d only ask it for her.” Then he added reflectively, “Only one person ever took me seriously; but she--” his face softened in a little smile--“will be my wife.” * * * * * The regiment, its twelve troops strung along the line like beads on a string, took station at Agua Caliente, on the Arizona border, and strove to prevent filibustering. Across the border the old Mexican city of Angeles lay steeped in the strong desert sunlight, a cascade of whitewashed cubicles glistening against a yellow hill, with the bell-shaped domes of the twin-towered cathedral sharply outlined against the turquoise sky above. The Mexican town was garrisoned by a battalion of half-starved, shoddily uniformed infantry, who eyed the big American troopers with envious wonder. There were _bailes_ and fiestas in the American town, but Swinnerton did not attend them. Every one admitted the change in him. His room at headquarters contained a field cot, a table, and two chairs. On the table were a writing-pad and a framed photograph of the face of Mary Smith. Here he spent much of his time. He carried on conversations with the girl in the picture, and his half of them he wrote down in bulky letters that sometimes had to be rolled because no envelop would hold them--pleasant fancies of a future in which he built a dream palace and furnished it from keep to turret with imaginings. He received letters done in the same spirit, and thus he strove to find refuge from the self that was daily becoming more and more intolerable to him.