out. Don't you think it
will interfere?"

The Doctor mused.

"I forgot that," he repeated and mused again. "You can't blame us, Mary;
we're at white heat"--

"Indeed I don't!" said Mary, with eager earnestness.

He reflected yet again.

"But--I don't know, either. It may be not as great a drawback as you
think. Here's Madame Zenobie, for instance"--

Madame Zenobie was just coming up the front steps from the garden,
pulling herself up upon the veranda wearily by the balustrade. She came
forward, and, with graceful acknowledgment, accepted the physician's
outstretched hand and courtesied.

"Here's Madame Zenobie, I say; you seem to get along with her."

Mary smiled again, looked up at the standing quadroon, and replied in a
low voice:--

"Madame Zenobie is for the Union herself."

"Ah! no-o-o!" exclaimed the good woman, with an alarmed face. She lifted
her shoulders and extended what Narcisse would have called the han' of
rep-u-diation; then turned away her face, lifted up her underlip with
disrelish, and asked the surrounding atmosphere,--"What I got to do wid
Union? Nuttin' do wid Union--nuttin' do wid Confederacie!" She moved
away, addressing the garden and the house by turns. "Ah! no!" She went
in by the front door, talking Creole French, until she was beyond
hearing.

Dr. Sevier reached out toward the child at Mary's knee. Here was one who
was neither for nor against, nor yet a fear-constrained neutral. Mary
pushed her persuasively toward the Doctor, and Alice let herself be
lifted to his lap.

"I used to be for it myself," he said, little dreaming he would one day
be for it again. As the child sank back into his arm, he noticed a
miniature of her father hanging from her neck. He took it into his
fingers, and all were silent while he looked long upon the face.

By and by he asked Mary for an account of her wanderings. She gave it.
Many of the experiences, that had been hard and dangerous enough when
she was passing through them, were full of drollery when they came to be
told, and there was much quiet amusement over them. The sunlight faded
out, the cicadas hushed their long-drawn, ear-splitting strains, and the
moon had begun to shine in the shadowy garden when Dr. Sevier at length
let Alice down and rose to take his lonely homeward way, leaving Mary to
Alice's prattle, and, when that was hushed in slumber, to gentle tears
and whispered thanksgivings above the little head.

CHAPTER LX.

"