nd her eyes softened with such swift tenderness when they met his,
that a wave of guilty shame swept through him. And when she came around
to him and passed, she leaned from the circle toward him, merry and
mock-reproachful:

"You mustn't look at me like that," she whispered, and Hunt, close at
hand, saw, guessed and smiled. Chad turned quickly away again.

That happy dawn--going home! The Major drowsed and fell asleep. The
first coming light, the first cool breath that was stealing over the
awakening fields, the first spring leaves with their weight of dew,
were not more fresh and pure than the love that was in the boy's heart.
He held his right hand in his left, as though he were imprisoning there
the memory of the last little clasp that she had given it. He looked at
the Major, and he wondered how anybody on earth, at that hour, could be
asleep. He thought of the wasted days of the past few months; the
silly, foolish life he had led, and thanked God that, in the memory of
them, there was not one sting of shame. How he would work for her now!
Little guessing how proud she already was, he swore to himself how
proud she should be of him some day. He wondered where she was, and
what she was doing. She could not be asleep, and he must have cried
aloud could he have known--could he have heard her on her knees at her
bedside, whispering his name for the first time in her prayers; could
he have seen her, a little later, at her open window, looking across
the fields, as though her eyes must reach him through the morning dusk.

That happy dawn--for both, that happy dawn!

It was well that neither, at that hour, could see beyond the rim of his
own little world. In a far Southern city another ball, that night, had
been going on. Down there the air was charged with the prescience of
dark trouble, but, while the music moaned to many a heart like a god in
pain, there was no brooding--only a deeper flush to the cheek, a
brighter sparkle to the eye, a keener wit to the tongue; to the dance,
a merrier swing. And at that very hour of dawn, ladies, slippered, bare
of head, and in evening gowns, were fluttering like white moths along
the streets of old Charleston, and down to the Battery, where Fort
Sumter lay, gray and quiet in the morning mist--to await with jest and
laughter the hissing shriek of one shell that lighted the fires of a
four years' hell in a happy land of God-fearing peace and God-given
plenty, and the hissing shriek