"Dear Captain Lucy:
"Here I am, and I haven't forgotten my promise. We'll soon be in the thick of it; but I can't say any more, only I think of you often. Send me any news of Bob's coming. R. H."
"William was wrong, after all, when he said we could tell where it came from by the postmark," said Marian, turning the card over with gentle fingers, "for there isn't any postmark, except New York."
That evening, when the two girls were getting ready for bed, Lucy said to Marian, with relief and thankfulness in her voice, "Anyway, there is no one else left to go just now." But she was not quite right.
Sergeant Cameron's wife had been ill a long time, and in spite of every care she died a few days after Bob's departure. The Sergeant was devoted to her, and soon he found his lonely little house unbearable, and his quiet round of duties grown suddenly distasteful. So one morning he summoned up courage to ask Major Gordon to have him transferred from his staff detail back to the regiment. Very reluctantly Major Gordon consented, for Sergeant Cameron's loss was a heavy one with the Quartermaster's Department swamped with work, and he had few such tried and capable assistants.
"I can't refuse you, Sergeant," he said at last. "I've put in the application for you, and I think it will be approved. Our regiment is still at Plattsburg Barracks, but there is talk of its soon seeing foreign service." Major Gordon thought of his own staff detail as he spoke, but whatever hopes or wishes he had in sympathy with the Sergeant's, he gave no voice to them.
"I'm very grateful to the Major," said Sergeant Cameron, saluting. "And I'm sorry to leave—I am indeed, sir."
So it was that in that short, eventful summer Lucy saw her friends go one by one, in such sudden changes as even army life had never known before. And in their places came others who were not always found to be such strangers either, for an army girl has friends from east to west, and must learn to bear partings bravely and make the most of those who are near at hand.