But what a scene of love and repentance and rejoicing was that when those two women, Aunt Marion and her niece, compared notes over the episode of that night's vigil and Sandy's part therein. Then his story of his coming was true, after all! Priscilla had seen him entering the front gate; had heard him at the door; had heard him pass round to the side of the house. Blenke it was who, counterfeiting even the painful little limp that still hampered Sandy's movements, had caused so many to believe it was Billy Ray's firstborn, in the dead of night, invading the quarters of a brother-officer, to the scandal of the service. They saw it all now, these good people who had dreamed so wildly, and some few there were who went to Ray during the brief fortnight that followed her final disappearance and said: "We knew you couldn't have been guilty of such a thought," but Sandy did not thank them. In his downright impulsiveness he had gone to Stone and told him the truth, and said he _had_ been guilty of such a thought, and asked the commander what he ought to say to Dwight; and Stone, after pondering over the matter, replied in effect, though not in these precise words, that he'd be d--elighted if he knew.
Time and Dwight solved that problem, as time solves others. The major remained not long at Minneconjou, nor did the Rays. The former, with little Jim ever at his side, went eastward for a while, whence letters came occasionally from both father and son. The latter found divided duties. An interesting event, an arrival extraordinary, called for the presence of Mrs. Ray in distant Manhattan, and Priscilla looked her last for many a day upon the fords of the Minneconjou and those hated tenements on the hither shore, to whose permanence and prosperity her own efforts had lent such unlooked-for aid. A wiser woman in many a way was Priscilla Sanford when she turned her clear eyes eastward again. Firm as before was her faith that she had a mission, but she had learned a lesson still needed by many of her sect, and by many of both sexes. She had a tale to unfold to most excellent theorists in the field that taught a new gospel in the cause of man's uplifting. They were found by Dwight and Jimmy at the seashore, late that summer, and Priscilla strolled hand in hand with her boy friend along the shining sands, and talked long and gravely with his sire as to the real way of reaching the moral nature of the enlisted soldier. They were joined by Sandy for a day or two in September--a rather grave-faced young gentleman, despite recent promotion and longed-for orders to join his troop in far Luzon. They were in no wise startled when a cable came from Colonel Ray--"Grandfather Billy" in spite of his looks--suggesting that they, too, come with Sandy. They were all at Manila in the late autumn, except the Dwights, and long before Christmas Priscilla had found in Colonel Blake, that old-time friend and comrade of Uncle Will, a most delighted listener to her theories. "Legs" was forever stumping round to the bungalow and starting Priscilla on her hobby, as he called it, and with preternatural gravity "drawing her out" as to the chief end of man. Somebody had told him of her Anti-Canteen and Soldiers' Aid Association at Minneconjou--and of its disruption, but he never twitted her as to that. It was the new scheme for the higher education and mental development of the soldier to which her energies were now bending, and as Blake was in town with little to do but nurse a wounded leg and serve on some perennial court-martial, he found his fun in frequent disquisitions with Priscilla, sometimes prolonging them until Mrs. Ray lost patience and drove him homeward, and privately wrote her liege lord, who was forever afield, running down _ladrones_, that he really must repress that irrepressible wag. "He isn't trying to flirt with Pris, is he?" asked Ray, inconsequently, on coming home, and was dull enough not to catch the full force of his wife's reply. "Flirt? Gerald Blake never knew how, and he's too much in love with his wife; and--besides----"