affair was to end and the proceeds of whose
tickets were pouring in upon Anna, acting treasurer, the treasurer being
ill.

Tormentingly in Hilary's way was this Lottery and Bazaar. Even from
Anna, sometimes especially from Anna, he could not understand why
certain things must not be told or certain things could not be done
until this Bazaar--etc. Why, at any hour he might be recalled! Yes,
Anna saw that--through very moist eyes. True, also, she admitted,
Beauregard and Johnston _might_ fail to hold off Buell and Grant; and
true, as well, New Orleans _could_ fall, and might be sacked. It was
while confessing this that with eyes down and bosom heaving she accepted
the old Italian knife. Certainly unless the pooh-poohing Mandeville was
wrong, who declared the forts down the river impregnable and Beauregard,
on the Tennessee, invincible, flight (into the Confederacy) was
safest--but--the Bazaar first, flight afterward. "We women," she said,
rising close before him with both hands in his, "must stand by _our_
guns. We've no more right"--it was difficult to talk while he kissed her
fingers and pressed her palms to his gray breast--"no more right--to be
cowards--than you men."

Her touch brought back his lighter mood and he told the happy
thought--project--which had come to him while they talked with the
jeweller. He could himself "do the job," he said, "roughly but well
enough." Anna smiled at the fanciful scheme. Yet--yes, its oddity was in
its favor. So many such devices were succeeding, some of them to the
vast advantage of the Southern cause.

When Flora the next evening stole a passing glance at the ugly trinket
in its place she was pleased to note how well it retained its soilure of
clay. For she had that day used it to free the panel, behind which she
had found a small recess so fitted to her want that she had only to
replace panel and tool and await some chance in the closing hours of the
show. Pleased she was, too, to observe that the old jewels lay in a
careless heap. Now to conceal all interest and to divert all eyes, even
grandmama's! Thus, however, night after night an odd fact eluded her:
That Anna and her hero, always singly, and themselves careful to lure
others away, glimpsed that disordered look of the gems and unmolested
air of the knife with a content as purposeful as her own. Which fact
meant, when came the final evening, that at last every sham jewel in the
knife's sheath had exchanged places with a r