e. There was now nothing in the world for which she cared to live.
She despised herself for such a feeling, but existence was a blank. She
had loved; perhaps, unwittingly, she had shown her love; and now by day
and by night she moaned and mourned that the bushwhacker nurse had ever
met the two brave soldiers with their glittering swords--that she had
not passed them by and gone out into the battle-field to be laid low by
some chance bullet."

For some little time the Daughter of the House had been speaking in a
voice which grew lower and lower, and now she stopped. There were tears
in her eyes, brought there by the story she herself was telling. John
Gayther dropped his pea-stick and leaned forward.

"Now miss," said he, "I really think your story is not quite right. You
must have forgotten something--a good many things. Think it over, and I
am sure you will agree with me that that is not the true ending."

She looked at him in surprise. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"I mean this," replied the gardener. "If you will put your mind to it,
and seriously consider the whole situation, I believe you will see, just
as well as I do, that it really turned out very differently from the way
you have just told it. That black-haired soldier did not go away in
twenty minutes. It must have been somebody else at some other time who
went away so soon. It would have been simply impossible for him to have
done it. The longer he sat and looked at Miss Almia, the more he gazed
into her beautiful eyes, the more fervently he must have thought that if
it depended upon him he would never leave her, never, never again. And
she, as she gazed into his handsome features, thrilling with the emotion
he could not hide, must have known what was passing in his heart. It did
not even need the words he soon spoke to make her understand she was the
one thing in the world he loved, and that, in spite of sickness and
obstacles of all sorts, he had come that day to tell her so. And when
they had sat together for hours, and at last he was obliged to go, and
they stood together, his impassioned eyes looking down into her orbs of
heavenly blue, you know what must have happened, miss, now, don't you,
really? And isn't this the true, true end of the story?"

The eyes of the Daughter of the House were sparkling; a little flush had
come upon her cheeks, and a smile upon her lips.

"I do really believe that is the true ending, John," said she; "but how
did you