"You are not going in yourself?" Quin protested, as she started to get out of the car.
"Why not? Haven't I been coming out here all the time?"
"Nonsense. What's the harm? I'll only be a minute?"
But Quin had already got out, and was holding the door with a large, firm hand.
"No," he said humbly but positively; "I'll go and bring him out here."
The unexpected note of authority in his voice nettled her instantly.
"I shall go myself," she insisted petulantly. "Let me out."
For a moment their eyes clashed in frank combat, hers angry and defiant, his adoring but determined.
"Listen here, Miss Bartlett," he urged. "The men wouldn't understand your coming out like this, at night, without your uniform. I told Cass I'd take care of you, and I'm going to do it."
"You mean that you will dare to stop me from getting out of my own car? Take your hand off that door instantly!"
She actually seized his big, strong fingers with her small gloved ones and tried to pull them away from the door. But Quin began to laugh, and in spite of herself she laughed back; and, while the two were childishly struggling for the possession of the door-handle, Captain Phipps all unnoticed passed out of the mess-hall, gave a few instructions to his waiting orderly, and disappeared in the darkness.
By the time they were on their way home, the moon, no longer dodging behind chimneys, had swaggered into the open. It was a hardened old highwayman of a moon, red in the face and very full, and it declared with every flashing beam that it was no respecter of persons, and that it intended doing all the mischief possible down there in the little world of men.
Miss Eleanor Bartlett was its first victim. In the white twilight she forgot the social gap that lay between her and the youth beside her. She ceased to observe the size and roughness of his hands, but noted instead the fine breadth of his shoulders. She concerned herself no longer with his verbal lapses, but responded instead to his glowing confidence that everybody was as sincere and well intentioned as himself. She discovered what the more sophisticated Rose had perceived at once--that Quinby Graham "had a way with him," a beguiling, sympathetic way that made one tell him things that one really didn't mean to tell any one. Of course, it was partly due to the fact that he asked such outrageously direct questions, questions that no one in her most intimate circle of friends would dare to ask. And the queer part of it was that she was answering them.