wrong done in a little day?"

"Ah! you are lost! He has bewitched and perverted you. You are talking
wildly."

"Stay with us one day, father, and if you will but listen to him, and
see him, you will love him."

"Helene, France lies only a few leagues away," he said gravely.

Helene trembled; then she went to the porthole and pointed to the
savannas of green water spreading far and wide.

"There lies my country," she said, tapping the carpet with her foot.

"But are you not coming with me to see your mother and your sister and
brothers?"

"Oh! yes," she cried, with tears in her voice, "if _he_ is willing, if
he will come with me."

"So," the General said sternly, "you have neither country nor kin now,
Helene?"

"I am his wife," she answered proudly, and there was something very
noble in her tone. "This is the first happiness in seven years that has
not come to me through him," she said--then, as she caught her father's
hand and kissed it--"and this is the first word of reproach that I have
heard."

"And your conscience?"

"My conscience; he is my conscience!" she cried, trembling from head to
foot. "Here he is! Even in the thick of a fight I can tell his footstep
among all the others on deck," she cried.

A sudden crimson flushed her cheeks and glowed in her features, her eyes
lighted up, her complexion changed to velvet whiteness, there was joy
and love in every fibre, in the blue veins, in the unconscious trembling
of her whole frame. That quiver of the sensitive plant softened the
General.

It was as she had said. The captain came in, sat down in an easy-chair,
took up his oldest boy, and began to play with him. There was a moment's
silence, for the General's deep musing had grown vague and dreamy, and
the daintily furnished cabin and the playing children seemed like a nest
of halcyons, floating on the waves, between sky and sea, safe in the
protection of this man who steered his way amid the perils of war and
tempest, as other heads of household guide those in their care among
the hazards of common life. He gazed admiringly at Helene--a dreamlike
vision of some sea goddess, gracious in her loveliness, rich in
happiness; all the treasures about her grown poor in comparison with
the wealth of her nature, paling before the brightness of her eyes, the
indefinable romance expressed in her and her surroundings.

The strangeness of the situation took the General by surprise; the ideas
of ordinary life wer