ion, had taken in
every change of the night, the promise of the day came almost as a
personal wrong. That the glare of the sunshine should fall on her
pain--that the necessity for meeting mere acquaintances with the same
face as yesterday should exist, now that her life lay so scorched and
sere before her, filled her with rebellious impatience.

But when, with the growing light, the first sounds of household waking
came to her, she rose wearily, and went, with tired, heavy steps to her
own room. And Nelly, coming in half an hour later, with an indefinite
sense of uneasiness, found an older face than last evening's on the
pillow, with harder lines about the mouth, and with a wearier droop of
the eyelids. The voice, too, that answered her good morning, had a kind
of echoing dreariness in it. But such traces are not patent to many eyes
or ears, and Nelly did not realize them.

There are a few women, mostly of this dark, slender type, who bear these
wrenching heart agonies as some animals bear extremest suffering of
body--not a sound or struggle testifies to pain--receiving blow after
blow without hope or thought of appeal--going off by and by to die, or
to suffer back to life alone. Not much merit in it, perhaps--a passive,
hopeless endurance of an inevitable torture; but such tortures warp or
shape a lifetime. Rarely ever eyes that have watched out such a night
see the sun rise with its old promise.

Clement Moore, coming slowly back to life after a fortnight of delirium,
found the woods ablaze with October, and Miss Berkeley gone. Another
fortnight, and he was with his regiment. Captain George--off on some
scouting expedition--was not in camp to meet him. But stretched out on
the dry turf a night or two after, through the clash of the band on the
hillside above broke Captain George's sonorous voice, and straightway
followed such a catalogue of questions as dwellers in camps have always
ready to propound to the latest comer from the northward. Concluding
finally with--

'And you didn't fall in love with 'the princess'?' Poor Captain George!
The prodigious effort _ought_ to have kept the heart throb out of his
voice, though it didn't. Moore's quick ear caught it (sympathy has a
wonderfully quickening effect on the perceptions sometimes), and he took
refuge in a truth that in no way touched the past few months--feeling
like a coward and traitor meanwhile, and yet utterly helpless to save
either himself or his friend fro