“Perhaps Captain Somers will excuse you for a few moments, while I refresh your memory.”

“Certainly; to be sure,” added the polite staff officer.

He moved towards the door at which the lady stood. Somers saw her whisper something to him as she took him familiarly by the arm.

“O, yes, I remember all about it now!” exclaimed he, with sudden vivacity. “I will return in a few moments, Captain Somers, if you will excuse me.”

“By all means; don’t let me interfere with any arrangement you have made.”

They retired, and the door closed behind them. Somers was not a little befogged by the conduct of both the lady and the gentleman. Several times she had interrupted him, and the major had an astonishingly bad memory. He seemed not to remember even the skirmish on the road; and he was equally unmindful of what had passed between him and the lady at some period antecedent to the present.

They were quite intimate; and, slightly versed as the young officer was in affairs of love and matrimony, he had no difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that the interesting couple who had just left him were more than friends; and though he had not the skill to determine what particular point in the courtship they had reached, he ventured to believe they were engaged. Though it was rather a rash and unauthorized conclusion, it was a correct one; showing that young men know some things by intuition.

Somehow Major Riggleston did not appear exactly as he had appeared the preceding day. His uniform did not look quite so bright; his manner was more brusque and less polished; and he spoke with a heavier and more solid tone. But men are not always the same on one day that they are on another; and it was quite probable that the major was suffering for the want of his dinner, or from some vexation not apparent to the casual observer.

Somers wanted his dinner; not as an epicure is impatient for the feast which is to tickle his palate, but as a man who knows and feels that meat is strength. His health was not yet sufficiently established to enable him to endure the hardship of an empty stomach; for his muscles seemed, in his present weak state, to derive their power more directly than usual from that important organ. He did not, therefore, worry himself to obtain a solution of what was singular in the conduct of the lady and her lover.

They were absent but a few moments before the major returned. 

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