the first kiss
Morris gave her, calling her "My own little Katy," she felt stealing
over her the same indescribable peace she had always felt with him,
intensified now, and sweeter from the knowing it would remain if she
should will it so. And she did will it so, kissing Morris back when he
asked her to, and thus sealing the compact of her second betrothal. It
was not exactly like the first. There was no tumultuous emotions, or
ecstatic joys, but Katy felt in her inmost heart that she was happier
now than then, that between herself and Morris there was more affinity
than there had been between herself and Wilford, and as she looked back
over the road she had come, and remembered all Morris had been to her,
she wondered at her blindness in not recognizing and responding to the
love in which she had now found shelter.

It was very late that night when Katy crept up to bed, and Helen, who
was not asleep, knew by the face on which the lamplight fell, as Katy
sat for a moment in thoughtful mood, looking out into the darkness, that
Morris had not sued in vain. Aunt Betsy knew it, too, next morning, by
the same look on Katy's face, when she came downstairs, but this did not
prevent her saying, abruptly, as Katy stood by the sink:

"Be you two engaged?"

"We are," was Katy's frank reply, which brought back all Aunt Betsy's
visions of roasted fowls and frosted cake, and maybe a dance in the
kitchen, to say nothing of the feather bed which she had not dared to
offer Katy Cameron, but which she thought would come in play for "Miss
Dr. Grant."

CHAPTER LIII.

THE PRISONERS.

Many of the captives were coming home. Prison after prison had given up
its starving, vermin-eaten inmates, while all along the Northern lines
loving hearts were waiting, and friendly hands outstretched to welcome
them back to "God's land," as the poor, suffering creatures termed the
soil over which waved the Stars and Stripes, for which they had fought
so bravely. Wistfully, thousands of eyes ran over the long columns of
names of those returned, each eye seeking for its own, and growing dim
with tears as it failed to find it, or lighting up with untold joy when
it was found.

"Lieutenant Robert Reynolds" and "Thomas Tubbs," Helen read among the
list of those just arrived at Annapolis, but "Captain Mark Ray" was not
there, and with a sickening feeling of disappointment she passed the
paper to her mother-in-law, and hastened away, to weep and p