Later that day, when the doctor had a little talk with Clancy, the ex-dragoon declared he was going to reform for all he was worth.  He was only a distress to everybody when he drank.

“All right, Clancy.  And when you are perfectly yourself you can come and see Lieutenant Hayne as soon as you like.”

“Loot’nant Hayne is it, sir?  Shure I’d be beggin’ his pardon for the vexation I gave him last night.”

“But you have something you wanted to speak with him about.  You said so last night, Clancy,” said the doctor, looking him squarely in the eye.

“Shure I was dhrunk, sir.  I didn’t mane it,” he answered; but he shrank and cowered.

The doctor turned and left him.

“If it’s only when he’s drunk that conscience pricks him and the truth will out, then we must have him drunk again,” quoth this unprincipled practitioner.

That same afternoon Miss Travers found that a headache was the result of confinement to an atmosphere somewhat heavily charged with electricity.  Mrs. Rayner seemed to bristle every time she approached her sister.  Possibly it was the heart, more than the head, that ached, but in either case she needed relief from the exposed position she had occupied ever since Kate’s return from the Clancys’ in the morning.  She had been too long under fire, and was wearied.  Even the cheery visits of the garrison gallants had proved of little avail, for Mrs. Rayner was in very ill temper, and made snappish remarks to them which two of them resented and speedily took themselves off.  Later Miss Travers went to her room and wrote a letter, and then the sunset gun shook the window, and twilight settled down upon the still frozen earth.  She bathed her heated forehead and flushed cheeks, threw a warm cloak over her shoulders, and came slowly down the stairs.  Mrs. Rayner met her at the parlor door.

“Kate, I am going for a walk, and shall stop and see Mrs. Waldron.”

“Quite an unnecessary piece of information.  I saw him as well as you.  He has just gone there.”

Miss Travers flushed hot with indignation: 

“I have seen no one; and if you mean that Mr. Hayne has gone to Major Waldron’s, I shall not.”

“No:  I’d meet him on the walk:  it would only be a trifle more public.”

“You have no right to accuse me of the faintest expectation of meeting him anywhere.  I repeat, I had not thought of such a thing.”

“You might just as well do it.  You cannot make your antagonism to my husband much more pointed than you have already.  And as for meeting Mr. Hayne, the only advice I presume to give now is that for your own sake you keep your blushes under better control than you did the last time you met—­that I know of.”  And, with this triumphant insult as a parting shot, Mrs. Rayner wheeled and marched off through the parlor.