dream of triumph and
conquest was over! What a "looney" she had been! Instead of inviting
him in, and outdoing him in "company manners," and "fooling" him about
the deserter, and then blazing upon him afterwards at Logport in the
glory of her first spent wealth and finery, she had driven him away!

And now "he'll go and tell--tell the Fort girls of his hairbreadth
escape from the claws of the Kingfisher's daughter!"

The thought brought a few bitter tears to her eyes, but she wiped them
away. The thought brought also the terrible conviction that Jim was
right, that there could be nothing but open antagonism between them and
the traducers of their parents, as she herself had instinctively shown!
But she presently wiped that conviction away also, as she had her tears.

Half an hour later she was attracted by the appearance from the windows
of certain straggling blue spots on the upland that seemed moving
diagonally towards the Marsh. She did not know that it was Calvert's
second "detail" joining him, but believed for a moment that he had not
yet departed, and was strangely relieved. Still later the frequent
disturbed cries of coot, heron, and marsh-hen, recognizing the presence
of unusual invaders of their solitude, distracted her yet more, and
forced her at last with increasing color and an uneasy sense of shyness
to steal out to the gallery for a swift furtive survey of the Marsh.
But an utterly unexpected sight met her eyes, and kept her motionless.

The birds were rising everywhere and drifting away with querulous
perturbation before a small but augmented blue detachment that was
moving with monotonous regularity towards the point of bushes where she
had seen the young officer previously disappear. In their midst,
between two soldiers with fixed bayonets, marched the man whom even at
that distance she instantly recognized as the deserter of the preceding
night, in the very clothes she had given him. To complete her
consternation, a little to the right marched the young officer also,
but accompanied by, and apparently on the most amicable terms with,
Jim--her own brother!

To forget all else and dart down the steps, flying towards the point of
bushes, scarcely knowing why or what she was doing, was to Maggie the
impulse and work of a moment. When she had reached it the party were
not twenty paces away. But here a shyness and hesitation again seized
her, and she shrank back in the bushes with an instinctive