nly broke loose: she declared that she loved him; that she had
always loved him--always--ever since he had been so good to her--a great
big boy to a little bit of a girl--at school, and that she did not know
why she had been so mean to him; for when she had treated him worst she
had loved him most; that she had gone down the path that night when
they had met, for the purpose of meeting him and of letting him know she
loved him; but something had made her treat him as she did, and all the
time she could have let him kill her for love of him. She said she had
told her mother and father she loved him and she had tried to tell his
mother, but she could not, for she was afraid of her; but she wanted him
to tell her when he came; and she had tried to help her and keep her
in wood ever since he went away, for his sake. Then the letter told how
poorly his mother was and how she had failed of late, and she said she
thought he ought to get a furlough and come home, and when he did she
would marry him. It was not very well written, nor wholly coherent;
at least it took some time to sink fully into Darby's somewhat dazed
intellect; but in time he took it in, and when he did he sat like a man
overwhelmed. At the end of the letter, as if possibly she thought, in
the greatness of her relief at her confession, that the temptation she
held out might prove too great even for him, or possibly only because
she was a woman, there was a postscript scrawled across the coarse, blue
Confederate paper: "Don't come without a furlough; for if you don't come
honorable I won't marry you." This, however, Darby scarcely read. His
being was in the letter. It was only later that the picture of his
mother ill and failing came to him, and it smote him in the midst of his
happiness and clung to him afterward like a nightmare. It haunted him.
She was dying.

He applied for a furlough; but furloughs were hard to get then and he
could not hear from it; and when a letter came in his mother's name in
a lady's hand which he did not know, telling him of his mother's poverty
and sickness and asking him if he could get off to come and see her, it
seemed to him that she was dying, and he did not wait for the furlough.
He was only a few days' march from home and he felt that he could see
her and get back before he was wanted. So one day he set out in the
rain. It was a scene of desolation that he passed through, for the
country was the seat of war; fences were gone, w