with half a dozen young bachelors that Mrs. Rayner speedily felt herself compelled to complain.  It was a blessed relief to the elder sister.  Her surcharged spirit was in sore need of an escape-valve.  She was ready to boil over in the mental ebullition consequent upon Mr. Hayne’s reception at the post, and with all the pent-up irritability which that episode had generated she could not have contained herself and slept.  But here Miss Travers came to her relief.  Her beauty, her winsome ways, her unqualified delight in everything that was soldierly, speedily rendered her vastly attractive to all the young officers in garrison.  Graham and Foster of the infantry, Merton, Webster, and Royce of the cavalry, haunted the house at all manner of hours, and the captain bade them welcome and urged them to come oftener and stay later, and told Mrs. Rayner he wanted some kind of a supper or collation every night.  He set before his guests a good deal of wine, and drank a good deal more himself than he had ever been known to do before, and they were keeping very late hours at Rayner’s, for, said the captain, “I don’t care if Nellie is engaged:  she shall have a good time while she’s here; and if the boys know all about it,—­goodness knows you’ve told them often enough, Kate,—­and they don’t mind it, why, it’s nobody’s business,—­here, at least.”

What Mr. Van Antwerp might think or care was another matter.  Rayner never saw him, and did not know him.  He rather resented it that Van Antwerp had never written to him and asked his consent.  As Mrs. Rayner’s husband and Nellie’s brother-in-law, it seemed to him he stood in loco parentis; but Mrs. Rayner managed the whole thing herself, and he was not even consulted.  If anything, he rather enjoyed the contemplation of Van Antwerp’s fidgety frame of mind as described to him by Mrs. Rayner about the time it became apparent to her that Nellie was enjoying the attentions of which she was so general an object, and that the captain was sitting up later and drinking more wine than was good for him.  She was aware that the very number of Nell’s admirers would probably prevent her becoming entangled with any one of them, but she needed something to scold about, and eagerly pitched upon this.  She knew well that she could not comfort her husband in the anxiety that was gnawing at his heart-strings, but she was jealous of comfort that might come to him from any other source, and the Lethe of wine and jolly companionship she dreaded most of all.  Long, long before, she had induced him to promise that he would never offer the young officers spirits in his house.  She would not prohibit wine at table, she said; but she never thought of there coming a time when he himself would seek consolation in the glass and make up in quantity what it lacked in alcoholic strength.  He was impatient of all reproof now, and would listen to no talk; but Nellie was years her junior,—­more years than she would admit except at such times as these, when she meant to admonish; and Nellie had to take it.