ul old creature's neck, and,
bursting into tears, exclaimed,--

"Oh, Anjy! 't was the act of a devil! I hate him for it!"

"Mind what you say, Barbara!" said Mrs. Dinwiddie.

Barbara withdrew her arms, and, folding them, looked her mother straight
in the face and said,--

"My father did not speak too harshly of it. 'T was a foul and cowardly
murder."

"Oh!" cried Mrs. Dinwiddie, again threatening a relapse into hysterics.

"My dear, dear Anjy," said Barbara, her tears flowing afresh, "come up
to my room, and I will read you your letter."

With a face tearless and inflexible, Anjy allowed herself to be led out
of the dining-hall, and up stairs into Barbara's apartment. The two
stayed there a couple of hours, heedless of every summons for them to
come forth.

II.

At seventeen the process of conversion is apt to be rapid. Barbara lay
awake nearly all that night, thinking, praying, and weeping. With her
sudden detestation of Pegram mingled the personal consideration that he
knew that Tony was the son of her own favorite Anjy,--the friend of her
childhood.

"If he had had one spark of true regard for me," thought Barbara, "not
to save the whole Southern Confederacy would he have shot the son of
Anjy. Pegram is a brutal ruffian, and Slavery has made him that."

Anjy helped on the work of conversion by her anguish and her solemn
adjurations. The old woman had picked up arguments, both moral and
economical, enough to have posed even Mr. Alexander H. Stephens himself,
the philosophical apostle of that new dispensation whose deity was born
of the cotton-gin and sired by the devil Avarice.

Barbara rose and breakfasted late that morning. At eleven o'clock she
took her music-lesson. Let us leave her for a few minutes, and fly to
another part of the city, where, in one of the rooms of the
Provost-Marshal's office, the Rebel mail was being examined. Captain
Penrose entered, and Detective Wilkins handed him a letter he had just
opened. It was addressed to Colonel Pegram, and was signed by Mrs.
Daniel Dinwiddie. We will take the liberty of quoting a portion of it.

"I know, my dear Charlie, that you have been obliged to draw
largely on your financial resources in aid of the great
cause of Southern independence, and I am not surprised that
you should find yourself so severely pushed for money. I
sent you five hundred dollars in greenbacks in my last, the
savings of Barbara and myself. I