"But you will come again in winter?" he murmured in a low voice to Laura.
"If mother permits," she answered, looking down at her boot tip, then up again, smiling, into his face.
"Mrs Bentley, you'll bring the girls here again, this winter, won't you?" appealed Dick.
"If Dr. Bentley and Belle's parents approve, I'll try to," answered the matron.
Then came the leave-takings, brief and open. With a final lifting of their caps Dick and the others turned and strode down the path. Laura and Belle gazed after them until the young men had disappeared into the encampment.
But you may be sure the girls were over on the parade ground by the time that the good old gray battalion had turned out and marched over, forming in battalion front.
It was a beautiful sight. Mrs. Bentley wasn't martial, but as she looked on at that straight, inflexible wall of gray and steel, as the band played the colors up to the right of line, the good matron was thinking to herself:
"What a pity that the country hasn't a thousand such battalions of the flower of young American manhood! Then what fear could we know in time of war?"
The girls looked on almost breathlessly, starting at the boom of the sunset gun, then thrilling with a new realization of what their country meant when the band crashed out in the exultant strains of the "Star Spangled Banner" and the Stars and Stripes fluttered down at West Point, to rise on another day of the nation's life.
It was over, and the visitors took the stage to the railway station.