After the beginning of his acquaintanceship with her, and all during the days when he stirred things up in the offices and shops of the gun company, tales of the assiduous and often needy young men who were camped on her trail reached Sam’s ears. They would be in at the office to see and talk with the colonel, who had several times confided to Sam that his daughter Sue was already past the age at which right-minded young women should marry, and in the absence of the father two or three of them had formed a habit of stopping for a word with Sam, whom they had met through the colonel or Jack Prince. They declared that they were “squaring themselves with the colonel.” Not a difficult thing to do, Sam thought, as he drank the wine, smoked the cigars, and ate the dinners of all without prejudice. Once, at luncheon, Colonel Tom discussed these young men with Sam, pounding on a table so that the glasses jumped about, and calling them damned upstarts. For his own part, Sam did not feel that he knew Sue Rainey, and although, after their first meeting one evening at the Rainey house, he had been pricked by a mild curiosity concerning her, no opportunity to satisfy it had presented itself. He knew that she was athletic, travelled much, rode, shot, and sailed a boat; and he had heard Jack Prince speak of her as a woman of brains, but, until the incident of the colonel and Luella London threw them for the moment into the same enterprise and started him thinking of her with real interest, he had seen and talked with her for but brief passing moments brought about by their mutual interest in the affairs of her father. After Janet Eberly’s sudden death, and while he was yet in the midst of his grief at her loss, Sam had his first long talk with Sue Rainey. It was in Colonel Tom’s office, and Sam, walking hurriedly in, found her sitting at the colonel’s desk and staring out of the window at a broad expanse of flat roofs. A man, climbing a flag pole to replace a slipped rope, caught his attention and standing by the window looking at the minute figure clinging to the swaying pole, he began talking of the absurdity of human endeavour. The colonel’s daughter listened respectfully to his rather obvious banalities and getting up from her chair came to stand beside him. Sam turned slyly to look at her firm brown cheeks as he had looked on the morning when she had come to see him about Luella London and was struck by the thought that she in some faint way reminded him of Janet Eberly. In a moment, and rather to his own surprise, he burst into a long speech telling of Janet, of the tragedy of her loss and something of the beauty of her life and character. The nearness of his loss and the nearness also of what he thought might be a sympathetic listener spurred him and he found himself getting a kind of relief for the aching sense of loss for his dead comrade by heaping praises upon her life.