ain
for practical steps, and the manly loser commended.

"But think of that from me, Fred! who one year ago--you know how I
talked--about Steve, for instance. Shame!--how reckless war's made us.
Here we are, by millions, in a perpetual crash of victory and calamity,
and yet--take me for an example--in spite of me my one devouring
anxiety--that wakes me up in the night and gives me dreams in the
day--is how to get her before this next battle get's me. Yes, the
instant I'm ordered I go, and if I'm not ordered soon I go anyhow. I
wouldn't have my boys"--etc.

And still the prison-blanched Greenleaf approved. But the next
revelation reddened his brow: Anna, Hilary said, had at last "come
round--knuckled down! Yes, sir-ee, cav-ed in!" and this evening, after
the Bazaar, to a few younger sisters of the battery whom she would ask
to linger for a last waltz with their young heroes, she would announce
her engagement and her purpose to be wed in a thrillingly short time.

The two men found the Bazaar so amusingly collapsed that, as Hilary
said, you could spell it with a small b. A stream of vehicles coming and
going had about emptied the house and grounds. No sentries saluted, no
music chimed. In the drawing-rooms the brass gun valiantly held its
ground, but one or two domestics clearing litter from the floors seemed
quite alone there, and some gay visitors who still tarried in the
library across the hall were hardly enough to crowd it. "Good," said
Hilary beside the field-piece. "You wait here and I'll bring the
Callenders as they can come."

But while he went for them whom should Greenleaf light upon around a
corner of the panelled chimney-breast but that secret lover of the
Union and all its defenders, Mademoiselle Valcour. Her furtive
cordiality was charming as she hurriedly gave and withdrew a hand in joy
for his liberation.

"Taking breath out of the social rapids?" he softly inquired.

"Ah, more! 'Tis from that deluge of--"

He understood her emotional gesture. It meant that deluge of
disloyalty--rebellion--there across the hall, and all through this
turbulent city and land. But it meant, too, that they must not be seen
to parley alone, and he had turned away, when Miranda, to Flora's
disgust, tripped in upon them with her nose in full wrinkle, archly
surprised to see Flora here, and proposing to hale both into the general
throng to applaud Anna's forthcoming "proclamation!"

Greenleaf de trop? Ah, nay! not if he