ing against--against, eh--"

"Making brides to-day and widows to-morrow?"

"Yes, that while none of these is large enough in his view to stop him
by itself, yet combined they--"

"All working together they do it," said the girl. Really she had no such
belief, but Irby's poor wits were so nearly useless to her that she
found amusement in misleading them.

"Hilary tells me they do," he replied, "but the more he says it the less
I believe him. Miss Flora, the fate of all my uncle holds dear is
hanging by a thread, a spider's web, a young girl's freak! If ever she
gives him a certain turn of the hand, the right glance of her eye, he'll
be at her feet and every hope I cherish--"

"Captain Irby," Flora softly asked with her tinge of accent, "is not
this the third time?"

"Yes, if you mean again that--"

"That Anna, she is my dear, dear frien'! The fate of nothing, of nobody,
not even of me--or of--you--" she let that pronoun catch in her
throat--"can make me to do anything--oh! or even to wish anything--not
the very, very best for her!"

"Yet I thought it was our understanding--"

"Captain: There is bitwin us no understanding excep'"--the voice grew
tender--"that there is no understanding bitwin us." But she let her eyes
so meltingly avow the very partnership her words denied, that Irby felt
himself the richest, in understandings, of all men alive.

"What is that they are looking?" asked his idol, watching Anna and
Hilary. The old battle ground had been passed. Anna, gazing back toward
its townward edge, was shading her eyes from the burnished water, and
Hilary was helping her make out the earthwork from behind which peered
the tents of Kincaid's Battery while beyond both crouched low against
the bright west the trees and roof of Callender House--as straight in
line from here, Flora took note, as any shot or shell might ever fly.

XXVII

HARD GOING, UP STREAM

Very pleasant it was to stand thus on the tremulous deck of the swiftest
craft in the whole Confederate service. Pleasant to see on either hand
the flat landscape with all its signs of safety and plenty; its orange
groves, its greening fields of young sugar-cane, its pillared and
magnolia-shaded plantation houses, its white lines of slave cabins in
rows of banana trees, and its wide wet plains swarming with wild birds;
pleasant to see it swing slowly, majestically back and melt into a
skyline as low and level as the ocean's.

Anna and Kincaid w