ured from him, not as through the lips
alone but from his very eyes and nostrils. That the girl was first of
all a fool and damned was but a trivial part of the cry--of the
explosion of his whole year's mistaken or half-mistaken inferences and
smothered indignation. With equal flatness and blindness he accused her
of rejoicing in the death of Kincaid: the noblest captain (he ramped on)
that ever led a battery; kindest friend that ever ruled a camp; gayest,
hottest, daringest fighter of Shiloh's field; fiercest for man's purity
that ever loved the touch of women's fingers; sternest that ever wept on
the field of death with the dying in his arms; and the scornfullest of
promotion that ever was cheated of it at headquarters.

All these extravagances he cursed out, too witless to see that this same
hero of his was the one human being, himself barely excepted, for whose
life his sister cared. He charged her of never having forgiven Hilary
for making Anna godmother of their flag, and of being in some dark
league against him--"hell only knew what"--along with that snail of a
cousin whom everybody but Kincaid himself and the silly old uncle knew
to be the fallen man's most venomous foe. Throughout the storm the
grandmother's fingers pattered soothing caresses, while Flora stood as
unruffled by his true surmises as by any, a look of cold interest in her
narrowed eyes, and her whole bodily and spiritual frame drinking relief
from his transport. Now, while he still raged, she tenderly smiled on
their trembling ancestress.

"Really, _you_ know grandmama, sometimes me also I feel like that, when
to smazh the furniture 't would be a delightful--or to wring somebody
the neck, yes. But for us, and to-day, even to get a li'l' mad, how is
that a possibl'?" She turned again, archly, to the brother, but flashed
in alarm and sprang toward him.

His arm stiffly held her off. With failing eyes bent on the whimpering
grandmother he sighed a disheartened oath and threshed into a chair
gasping--

"My wound--opened again."

XLVI

THE SCHOOL OF SUSPENSE

Thus it fell to Flora to be letter-bearer and news-bearer in her
brother's stead. Yet he had first to be cared for by her and the
grandmother in a day long before "first aid" had become common
knowledge. The surgeon they had hailed in had taken liberal time to show
them how, night and morning, to unbandage, cleanse and rebind, and to
tell them (smiling into the lad's mutinous eyes