A week rolled by, a week little Jim Lawrence and other small boys long remembered for the good things they had to eat and drink; and now Galahad was sitting up again at his quarters, doing very well, said both doctors, so well that he could be out on the shaded piazza in a reclining chair, said Brayton,--but wouldn't, said Blythe,--and for good reasons, said the Fraziers feminine, "because then there'd be no dodging Laura Winn, if, indeed, he has succeeded thus far." True, he had not ventured outside his doors, and no one had seen her venture within them. True, Mrs. Frazier, Mrs. Blythe, and other motherly women had been to visit him,--Mrs. Frazier frequently,--and Mrs. Winn had been most particular in her daily inquiries,--"most persistent," said the Frazier girls. Those were days in which milk was a luxury in far-away Texas, but the delicate custards, whips, creams, and what the colonel's Hibernian orderly described as "floating Irelands," which that messenger bore with Mrs. Frazier's love, or Miss Frazier's compliments, or Miss 'Manda Frazier's regards and hopes that the captain was better this morning, could be numbered only by the passing days. What Mrs. Frazier was prepared to see or hear of was similar attention on the part of Mrs. Winn; but Mrs. Winn's attentions took a form more difficult to see, and, even in a frontier, old-time garrison, to hear of.
What Mrs. Frazier was not prepared to see was Mrs. Blythe in frequent confidential chat with the officer whom the colonel's wife chose to consider her own invalid. She had always fancied Mrs. Blythe before, but now she met her with that indescribable tone suggestive of unmerited yet meekly, womanfully borne injury, which is so superior to either explanation or resentment. Mrs. Winn was frequently on her piazza chatting with Mr. Brayton or Dr. "Funnybone," as the wits of the post had designated Collabone's right bower, "who has more brains in one head," said Collabone, "than the mess has in ten;" but she greeted Mrs. Frazier with an austere and distant dignity even more pronounced than Mrs. Frazier's manner to Mrs. Blythe, which plainly showed that Laura had not "been raised in the army for nothing," and that she had a will and temper and pluck that would brook no airs and tolerate no aspersions on Mrs. Frazier's part. Aspersions there had been, for her friend Mrs. Faulkner had not failed in that sisterly duty which so many women so reluctantly yet faithfully perform, and everything Mrs. and the Misses Frazier had even hinted, and some things they even hadn't, were duly conveyed to Laura's ears. She was angered at the Fraziers for daring to say such things, at Mrs. Faulkner for daring to repeat them, and at Barclay for daring to keep her beyond the possibility of their being true. Never before had she known what it was to strive for a look or word of admiration and to meet utter indifference. Yet those blue eyes of Barclay's had once fairly burned with passionate delight in her girlish beauty, and his words had trembled with their weight of love for her. No other woman, she believed, had yet come into his life and banished all memory of her; and, now that her beauty was but the riper for her years, she rebelled in her soul against the whisper that it could no longer move him.