rginia laid the letter down, and tears started to her eyes as
she repressed a retort. It was not the first time this had happened.
At every Union victory Mr. Whipple would loose his tongue. How strange
that, with all his thought of others, he should fall short here!

One day, after unusual forbearance, Mrs. Brice had overtaken Virginia
on the stairway. Well she knew the girl's nature, and how difficult she
must have found repression. Margaret Brice had taken her hand.

"My dear," she had said, "you are a wonderful woman." That was all. But
Virginia had driven back to Bellegarde with a strange elation in her
heart.

Some things the Judge had forborne to mention, and for this Virginia was
thankful. One was the piano. But she had overheard Shadrach telling old
Nancy how Mrs. Brice had pleaded with him to move it, that he might have
more room and air. He had been obdurate. And Colonel Carvel's name had
never once passed his lips.

Many a night the girl had lain awake listening to the steamboats as they
toiled against the river's current, while horror held her. Horror lest
her father at that moment be in mortal agony amongst the heaps left by
the battle's surges; heaps in which, like mounds of ashes, the fire was
not yet dead. Fearful tales she had heard in the prison hospitals of
wounded men lying for days in the Southern sun between the trenches at
Vicksburg, or freezing amidst the snow and sleet at Donelson.

Was her bitterness against the North not just? What a life had been
Colonel Carvel's! It had dawned brightly. One war had cost him his wife.
Another, and he had lost his fortune, his home, his friends, all that
was dear to him. And that daughter, whom he loved best in all the world,
he was perchance to see no more.

Mrs. Colfax, yawning, had taken a book and gone to bed. Still Virginia
sat on the porch, while the frogs sang of rain, and the lightning
quivered across the eastern sky. She heard the crunch of wheels in the
gravel.

A bar of light, peopled by moths, slanted out of the doorway and fell
on a closed carriage. A gentleman slowly ascended the steps. Virginia
recognized him as Mr. Brinsmade.

"Your cousin Clarence has come home, my dear," he said. "He was among
the captured at Vicksburg, and is paroled by General Grant."

Virginia gave a little cry and started forward. But he held her hands.

"He has been wounded!"

"Yes," she exclaimed, "yes. Oh, tell me, Mr. Brinsmade, tell me--all--"

"No, he