inence. He
never, even in his own case, set aside its rigors except when chilled or
fatigued, and always then took ample care not to let his action, or any
subsequent confession, be a temptation in the eyes of others who might
be weaker than he.

Barbara sat opposite Jeff-Jack. What of that? Johanna, standing behind
mom-a's chair, should not have smiled and clapped her hands to her
mouth. Barbara ignored her. As she did again, after supper, when,
silent, on the young soldier's knee, amid an earnest talk upon interests
too public to interest her, she could see her little nurse tiptoeing
around the door out in the dim hall, grinning in white gleams of summer
lightning, beckoning, and pointing upstairs. The best way to treat such
things is to take no notice of them.

In the bright parlor the talk was still on public affairs. The war was
over, but its issues were still largely in suspense and were not
questions of boundaries or dynasties; they underlay every Southern
hearthstone; the possibilities of each to-morrow were the personal
concern and distress of every true Southern man, of every true Southern
woman.

Thus spoke Garnet. His strong, emotional voice was the one most heard.
Ravenel held Barbara, and responded scarcely so often as her mother,
whose gentle self-command rested him. Not such was its effect upon the
husband. His very flesh seemed to feel the smartings of trampled
aspirations and insulted rights. More than once, under stress of his
sincere though florid sentences, he rose proudly to his feet with a hand
laid unconsciously on his freshly bandaged arm, as though all the pain
and smart of the times were centring there, and tried good-naturedly to
reflect the satirical composure of his late adjutant. But when he sought
to make light of "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," he could
not quite hide the exasperation of a spirit covered with their
contusions; and when he spoke again, he frowned.

Mrs. Garnet observed Ravenel with secret concern. Men like Garnet,
addicted to rhetoric, have a way of always just missing the vital truth
of things, and this is what she believed this stripling had, in the
intimacies of the headquarter's tent, discerned in him, and now so
mildly, but so frequently, smiled at. "Major Garnet," she said, and
silently indicated that some one was waiting in the doorway. The Major,
standing, turned and saw, faltering with conscious overboldness on the
threshold, a tawny figure wh