ly
enough. "You heard the orders my General gave me in the first place,
and, in the second place, you know that I am a prisoner. It is odd that
you can play a game and forget the score. I imagined when I started
that my duty would be the greatest pleasure of my life."

"Do you know where you are going now?" she inquired, very seriously.

"It is a matter of indifference to me," I answered. "Wherever I go, I
am in the hands of Providence."

"If you could believe that," she remarked, "it would do you a world of
good."

I laughed at her serious manner. "Believe it!" I exclaimed. "Why, it is
too plain for mere belief. I do not believe it--I know it."

She was silent for a long time, and when she did speak her words,
showed that the matter was still on her mind. "It seems to me very
peculiar," she said, "that one so young should have such solemn
thoughts."

"Why do you call them solemn thoughts?" I asked. "Can anything be more
cheerful than to know that you are altogether in the hands of a higher
Power--to know that you will be taken care of; or, if you perish, to
know that it will be in the very nick of time?"

"You are too serious to be romantic," she said. "I should like to see
you making love."

"I can gratify your humor with a right good will--only the lady I would
make love to despises me."

"I'll never believe it," she declared, and it was evident that she
meant what she said.

"That is because you have only a vague idea of the cruelty of woman
when she has a man at her mercy--and knows it."

"I should like to see some woman at your mercy," she said. "No doubt
you would give free play to the strap and the rawhide and other
implements of the slave-driver."

Her words made me wince, and I must have shown the wound, for when I
looked at her her countenance wore an expression of regret and
repentance. "You must forgive me," she declared. "If we were to be
thrown together you would have to forgive me fifty times a day."

"Well, I thank heaven," I exclaimed, with some feeling, "that I was
never at the mercy of more than one woman, and that fact was mitigated
somewhat. She was arrayed in the garb of a man, and I was so sorry for
her that I forgot she had me at her mercy."

"You should have told her," the little lady declared. "Perhaps if she
had known her conduct would have been vastly different. You never know
what a woman will do until she has been put to the test."

"She did a good deal," I said, sullen