ld not do less and be a patriot. Some girl patriots had a dozen on
their list. Some lads had a dozen on theirs.

Ah, me! those swan-white, sky-blue, rose-pink maidens who in every town
and on every plantation from Memphis to Charleston, from Richmond to New
Orleans, despatched their billets by the forlornly precarious post only
when they could not send them by the "urbanity" of such or such a one!
Could you have contrasted with them the homeless, shelterless,
pencil-borrowing, elbow-scratching, musty, fusty tatterdemalions who
stretched out on the turfless ground beside their mess fires to extort
or answer those cautious or incautious missives, or who for the fortieth
time drew them from hiding to reread into their guarded or unguarded
lines meanings never dreamed by their writers, you could not have
laughed without a feeling of tears, or felt the tears without smiling.
Many a chap's epistle was scrawled, many a one even rhymed, in a
rifle-pit with the enemy's shells bursting over. Many a one was feebly
dictated to some blessed, unskilled volunteer nurse in a barn or
smoke-house or in some cannon-shattered church. From the like of that
who with a woman's heart could withhold reply? Yes, Anna and Hilary were
in correspondence.

So were Flora and Irby. So were Hilary and Flora. Was not Flora Anna's
particular friend and Hilary's "pilot"? She had accepted the office on
condition that, in his own heart's interest, their dear Anna should not
know of it.

"The better part of life"--she wrote--"is it not made up of such loving
concealments?"

And as he read the words in his tent he smilingly thought, "That looks
true even if it isn't!"

Her letters were much more frequent than Anna's and always told of Anna
fondly, often with sweet praises--not so sweet to him--of her impartial
graciousness to her semicircle of brass-buttoned worshippers. Lately
Flora had mentioned Greenleaf in a modified way especially disturbing.

If Anna could have made any one a full confidante such might have been
Flora, but to do so was not in her nature. She could trust without
stint. Distrust, as we know, was intolerable to her. She could not doubt
her friends, but neither could she unveil her soul. Nevertheless, more
than once, as the two exchanged--in a purely academical way--their
criticisms of life, some query raised by Anna showed just what had been
passing between her and Hilary and enabled Flora to keep them steered
apart.

No hard task