, the times being so highly calculated to make the course of
true love a "hard road to travel," as the singing soldier boys called
"Jordan." Letters, at any time, are sufficiently promotive of
misunderstandings, but in the Confederacy they drifted from camp to
camp, from pocket to pocket, like letters in bottles committed to the
sea. The times being such, I say, and Hilary and Anna as they were: he a
winner of men, yes! but by nature, not art; to men and women equally, a
grown up, barely grown up, boy. That is why women could afford to like
him so frankly. The art of courtship--of men or women--was not in him.
Otherwise the battery--every gun of which, they say, counted for two as
long as he was by--must have lost him through promotion before that
first year was half out. The moment he became a conscious suitor, to man
or woman, even by proxy, his power went from him; from pen, from tongue,
from countenance. And Anna--I may have shown the fact awkwardly, but
certainly you see--Anna was incurably difficult.

Too much else awaits our telling to allow here a recital of their
hearts' war while love--and love's foes--hid in winter quarters, as it
were. That is to say, from the season of that mad kiss which she had
never forgiven herself (much less repented), to the day of Beauregard's
appeal, early in '62, to all the plantations and churches in Dixie's
Land to give him their bells, bells, bells--every bit of bronze or brass
they could rake up or break off--to be cast into cannon; and to his own
Louisiana in particular to send him, hot speed, five thousand more men
to help him and Albert Sidney Johnston drive Buel and Grant out of
Tennessee.

Before the battery had got half way to Virginia Hilary had written back
to Anna his inevitable rhapsody over that amazing performance of hers,
taking it as patent and seal of her final, utter, absolute
self-bestowal. And indeed this it might have turned out to be had he but
approached it by a discreet circuit through the simplest feminine
essentials of negative make-believe. But to spring out upon it in that
straightforward manner--! From May to February her answer to this was
the only prompt reply he ever received from her. It crowds our story
backward for a moment, for it came on one of those early Peninsula days
previous to Manassas, happening, oddly, to reach him--by the hand of
Villeneuve--as he stood, mounted, behind the battery, under a smart
skirmish fire. With a heart leaping i