Chester entered the stable and looked curiously around.  Presently his eye lighted on a tall, rangy bay horse that was being groomed in a wide stall near the door-way.

“That’s Mr. Jerrold’s Roderick, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.  He’s fresh as a daisy, too,—­hasn’t been out for three days,—­and Mr. Jerrold’s going to drive the dog-cart this morning.”

Chester turned away.

“Sloat,” said he, as they left the stable, “if Mr. Jerrold was away from the post last night,—­and you heard me say he was out of his quarters,—­could he have gone any way except afoot, after what you heard Parks say?”

“Gone in the Suttons’ outfit, I suppose,” was Sloat’s cautious answer.

“In which event he would have been seen by the sentry at the bridge, would he not?”

“Ought to have been, certainly.”

“Then we’ll go back to the guard-house.”  And, wonderingly and uncomfortably, Sloat followed.  He had long since begun to wish he had held his peace and said nothing about the confounded roll-call.  He hated rows of any kind.  He didn’t like Jerrold, but he would have crawled ventre a terre across the wide parade sooner than see a scandal in the regiment he loved; and it was becoming apparent to his sluggish faculties that it was no mere matter of absence from quarters that was involving Jerrold.  Chester was all aflame over that picture-business, he remembered, and the whole drift of his present investigation was to prove that Jerrold was not absent from the post, but absent only from his quarters.  If so, where had he spent his time until nearly four?  Sloat’s heart was heavy with vague apprehension.  He knew that Jerrold had borne Alice Renwick away from the party at an unusually early hour for such things to break up.  He knew that he and others had protested against such desertion, but she declared it could not be helped.  He remembered another thing,—­a matter that he thought of at the time, only from another point of view.  It now seemed to have significance bearing on this very matter; for Chester suddenly asked,—­

“Wasn’t it rather odd that Miss Beaubien was not here at the dance?  She has never missed one, seems to me, since Jerrold began spooning with her last year.”

“Why, she was here.”

“She was?  Are you sure?  Rollins never spoke of it; and we had been talking of her.  I inferred from what he said that she was not there at all.  And I saw her drive homeward with her mother right after parade:  so it didn’t occur to me that she could have come out again, all that distance, in time for the dance.  Singular!  Why shouldn’t Rollins have told me?”

Sloat grinned:  a dreary sort of smile it was, too.  “You go into society so seldom you don’t see these things.  I’ve more than half suspected Rollins of being quite ready to admire Miss Beaubien himself; and since Jerrold dropped her he has had plenty of opportunity.”