at confronted her were kindly faces, and not critical, and some
of them she had learned to love right well.

"I am going away from you, my children," she said; "but before I go I
want to tell you how I came to be in North Carolina; so that if I have
been able to do anything here among you for which you might feel
inclined, in your good nature, to thank me, you may thank not me alone,
but another who came before me, and whose work I have but taken up where
_he_ laid it down. I had a friend,--a dear friend,--why should I be
ashamed to say it?--a lover, to whom I was to be married,--as I hope all
you girls may some day be happily married. His country needed him, and I
gave him up. He came to fight for the Union and for Freedom, for he
believed that all men are brothers. He did not come back again--he gave
up his life for you. Could I do less than he? I came to the land that he
sanctified by his death, and I have tried in my weak way to tend the
plant he watered with his blood, and which, in the fullness of time,
will blossom forth into the perfect flower of liberty."

She could say no more, and as the whole audience thrilled in sympathy
with her emotion, there was a hoarse cry from the men's side of the
room, and John forced his way to the aisle and rushed forward to the
platform.

"Martha! Martha!"

"Arthur! O Arthur!"

Pent-up love burst the flood-gates of despair and oblivion, and caught
these two young hearts in its torrent. Captain Arthur Carey, of the 1st
Massachusetts, long since reported missing, and mourned as dead, was
restored to reason and to his world.

It seemed to him but yesterday that he had escaped from the Confederate
prison at Salisbury; that in an encounter with a guard he had received a
wound in the head; that he had wandered on in the woods, keeping himself
alive by means of wild berries, with now and then a piece of bread or a
potato from a friendly negro. It seemed but the night before that he
had laid himself down, tortured with fever, weak from loss of blood, and
with no hope that he would ever rise again. From that moment his memory
of the past was a blank until he recognized Martha on the platform and
took up again the thread of his former existence where it had been
broken off.

* * * * *

And Cicely? Well, there is often another woman, and Cicely, all
unwittingly to Carey or to Martha, had been the other woman. For, after
all, her beautiful dream had b