"But how about Mary?"
"She will sleep, or, if she doesn't—and I suppose she won't—she is entirely happy. She will be glad to have me spend the night with you."
"Very well, then. Tell me the story of what has happened to you and Mary since the day when we quarreled like a pair of idiots, and—like men of sense—decided not to fight. I want to hear it all."
"I'll tell it all," said the other. And he did.
XIX
Dick Temple's Story
This is the story that Richard Temple told to his friend in the small hours of that night's morning. Let us dispense with quotation marks to cover it.
You know what my education was. My uncle, whose heir I was supposed to be, spared no expense to equip me for my life's work. He sent me to the best schools in the North, and afterwards to the best schools in Europe. Just at the beginning of the war, and because of it, I returned to Virginia. I secured a commission in the engineer corps, but I soon resigned it, because at the beginning of the war there was no earnest work for the engineer corps to do, and I foolishly thought there never would be. I enlisted as a private in the artillery, and before the end of the war I was a captain.