s to dance
attendance on wounded Confederate soldiers.

It was all in the day's work. Many a scout engulfed in the ranks of his
enemy must charge his own men to save his life. He would not only make
the best of it, he would take advantage of it to press his way a step
closer to her heart.

"Are all of the girls of the South like you, Miss Jennie?" he asked with
a quizzical smile.

"You mean insulting to their fathers?" she laughed.

"If you care to put it so--I mean, is their loyalty to the Confederacy a
mania?"

"Is mine a mania?"

"Perhaps I should say a divine passion--are all your Southern women thus
inspired?"

"Yes."

"In the far South and the West?"

"Everywhere!"

"It's wonderful."

"Perhaps because we can't fight we try to make up for it."

He watched her keenly.

"It's something bigger than that. Somehow it's a prophecy to me of a new
future--a new world. Maybe after all political wisdom shall not begin
and end with man."

Jennie blushed again under the admiring gaze with which Socola held her.

The carriage stopped at the door of the Alabama hospital. Socola leaped
to the ground and extended his hand for Jennie's. He allowed himself the
slightest pressure of the slender fingers as he lifted her out. It was
his right in just that moment to press her hand. He put the slightest
bit more than was needed to firmly grasp it, and the blood flamed hotly
in her cheeks.

He hastened to carry her baskets and boxes of peaches and grapes inside.

For an hour he followed her with faithful dog step in her ministry of
love. His orderly Northern mind shuddered at the sight of the confusion
incident to the sudden organization of this hospital work. He had heard
it was equally bad in the North. Two armed mobs had rushed into battle
with scarcely a thought of what might be done with the mangled men who
would be borne from the field.

Jennie bent low over the cot of a dying boy from her home county. He
clung to her hand piteously. The waters were too swift and deep for
speech. Before she could slip her hand from his and pass on the man on
the next cot died in convulsions.

Socola watched his agonized face with a strange sense of exaltation. It
was the law of progress--this way of death and suffering. The voice
within kept repeating the one big faith of his life:

"Not one drop of human blood shed in defense of truth and right is ever
spilled in vain!"

Through all the scenes of death and suffering be