“Not alone!” gasped Mrs. Clayton. “Never!” “I’d like to know why not?” her daughter asked, rather tartly. “I’ve been to Boston alone, and that’s farther.” “But it won’t look right--all those men, Ethel. You know some of them, too. There’s Mr. Barton!” “I expect to see him,” declared the girl composedly. “It--it doesn’t look right,” objected her mother more faintly. “I’d like to know why not? I should hope I was old enough to go about without a chaperon, or----” “Let Benway go with you,” urged Mrs. Clayton, hurriedly. But that was exactly what Ethel did not wish to do. Indeed, if possible, she should have liked to keep the knowledge of her trip to Quehasset from her mother. She hurried away early in the morning, before most of the folk at that end of Burnaby Street were astir, and boarded the train which stopped but a minute at the Mailsburg Station at eight o’clock. She noted, as she passed along the High Street to the station, that more than the usual number of automobiles were abroad and most of them headed for the Creek Road which was the first lap of the driving highway to the training camp. The Fuller car was one of these she saw. Helen was driving and her mother and father sat in the tonneau. Her cousins gave Ethel Clayton not the slightest notice, but she could not help being somewhat disturbed by the thought that they were likewise bound for the training camp and that they would see her there with Frank Barton. At any rate, she hoped to arrive at the army camp first. CHAPTER X LOVE AND BUSINESS Frank Barton had been thinking but little of love and not much about business. His entire time from the bugle-blown: “I can’t get ’em up! I can’t get ’em up! I can’t get ’em up in the mor-r-rning!” to tattoo at night was filled with thoughts military. In addition to the regular course in tactics, he was studying special branches, such as the science of gunfire, range finding, signaling, and the like, for he wished to be assigned to the Field Artillery branch of the service. His former experience in the Guard was of vast assistance to him, yet he found that even the brief campaign on the Mexican Border had greatly changed the drill and the training of both officers and men. New methods were being adopted all the time. He soon realized that a military formula based upon the experience gained by our War Department in the Civil War, and upon which basis the National Guard had been drilled in the past, was almost as old-fashioned as the rules for conducting a Field of Honor in the time of the Crusaders. The Great War has flung into the discard most established measures of warfare. Fancy, so many years after the tilting with spears, a fighting man wearing an iron pot on his head!