h the placid Flora. "Ah," said the latter, as he offered
her his escort home, "but grandma and me, we--"

Anna broke in: "They're going to stay here all night so that you may
ride at once to General Brodnax. Even we girls, Captain Irby, must do
all we can to help your cousin get away with the battery, the one wish
of his heart!" She listened, untwined and glided into the house.

Instantly Flora spoke: "Go, Adolphe Irby, go! Ah, _snatch_ your luck,
you lucky--man! Get him away to-night, cost what cost!" Her fingers
pushed him. He kissed them. She murmured approvingly, but tore them
away: "Go, go, go-o!"

Anna, pacing her chamber, with every gesture of self-arraignment and
distress, heard him gallop. Then standing in her opened window she
looked off across the veranda's balustrade and down into the camp, where
at lines of mess-fires like strings of burning beads the boys were
cooking three days' rations. A tap came on her door. She snatched up a
toilet brush: "Come in?"

She was glad it was only Flora. "Cherie," tinkled the visitor, "they
have permit' me!"

Anna beamed. "I was coming down," she recklessly replied, touching her
temples at the mirror.

"Yes," said the messenger, "'cause Mandeville he was biggening to tell
about Fort Sumter, and I asked them to wait--ah"--she took Anna's late
pose in the window--"how plain the camp!"

"Yes," responded Anna with studied abstraction, "when the window happens
to be up. It's so warm to-night, I--"

"Ah, Anna!"

"What, dear?" In secret panic Anna came and looked out at Flora's side
caressingly.

"At last," playfully sighed the Creole, "'tis good-by, Kincaid's
Battery. Good-by, you hun'red good fellows, with yo' hun'red horses and
yo' hun'red wheels and yo' hun'red hurras."

"And hundred brave, true hearts!" said Anna.

"Yes, and good-by, Bartleson, good-by, Tracy, good-by ladies' man!--my
dear, tell me once more! For him why always that name?" Both laughed.

"I don't know, unless it's because--well--isn't it--because every lady
has a piece of his heart and--no one wants all of it?"

"Ah! no one?--when so many?--"

"Now, Flora, suppose some one did! What of it, if he can't, himself,
get his whole heart together to give it to any one?" The arguer offered
to laugh again, but Flora was sad:

"You bil-ieve he's that way--Hilary Kincaid?"

"There are men that way, Flora. It's hard for us women to realize, but
it's true!"

"Ah, but for him! For him that's a dread