Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/349

Rh meet this Nathan of hers, a calm, composed, sensible young woman. She had come back with him, anything but that! David couldn't make her out—she seemed so sort of "jumpy," coloring up, eyes getting full of tears, and land knows what, right at the table, before people, if the young fellow as much as spoke to her. She had acquired, too, in her six weeks' absence with him, outlandish notions about following him around to training-camps, inconsistent with her former serene attitude toward him when he was at sea. The first letter she wrote home after she went to meet him in Boston, mailed some ten days or two weeks after her departure, bore the postmark of the town near the camp where he was in training. She was hanging around in a lodging-house, doing absolutely nothing, it appeared, but picking up odd scraps of half-days, or half-hours, or half-minutes, as the case might be, with this Nathan fellow of hers. It seemed to David that she acted kind of "cracked" about him, writing out in plain English how fine she thought he was, and repeating the flattering remarks of his superior officers. Unbecoming of a young woman married as long as she had been, David thought. She went so far as to say in the letter she wrote home, announcing that she and this man were to pay a visit to 89 Chestnut Street (he was to be transferred to another camp, she said, and a week's leave had been granted), she went so far as to say in that letter that if every captain in the United States Army was as adored by his men (yes, used the word "adored") as Nathan was, they would be ready to follow him blindfolded into the very jaws of death, as she herself was ready to follow him blindfolded to the ends