ife.
She did not see, though, why she should always be thinking of the arm
his father had lost.

There were not many letters from him, but they were such as she could
have wished, and she put her whole strength into making hers such as she
imagined he could have wished, glorifying and supporting him. She wrote
to his mother, but the brief answer she got was merely to the effect
that Mrs. Gearson was not well enough to write herself, and thanking her
for her letter by the hand of some one who called herself "Yrs truly,
Mrs. W.J. Andrews."

Editha determined not to be hurt, but to write again quite as if the
answer had been all she expected. But before it seemed as if she could
have written, there came news of the first skirmish, and in the list of
the killed which was telegraphed as a trifling loss on our side, was
Gearson's name. There was a frantic time of trying to make out that it
might be, must be, some other Gearson; but the name, and the company and
the regiment, and the State were too definitely given.

Then there was a lapse into depths out of which it seemed as if she
never could rise again; then a lift into clouds far above all grief,
black clouds, that blotted out the sun, but where she soared with him,
with George, George! She had the fever that she expected of herself, but
she did not die in it; she was not even delirious, and it did not last
long. When she was well enough to leave her bed, her one thought was of
George's mother, of his strangely worded wish that she should go to her
and see what she could do for her. In the exaltation of the duty laid
upon her--it buoyed her up instead of burdening her--she rapidly
recovered.

Her father went with her on the long railroad journey from northern New
York to western Iowa; he had business out at Davenport, and he said he
could just as well go then as any other time; and he went with her to
the little country town where George's mother lived in a little house on
the edge of illimitable corn-fields, under trees pushed to a top of the
rolling prairie. George's father had settled there after the civil war,
as so many other old soldiers had done; but they were Eastern people,
and Editha fancied touches of the East in the June rose overhanging the
front door, and the garden with early summer flowers stretching from the
gate of the paling fence.

It was very low inside the house, and so dim, with the closed blinds,
that they could scarcely see one another: Edit