into battle.
Throughout the Civil War the Southerners wrote much so-called poetry and
their newspapers were filled with it. This story of the man and the maid
appealed to them. If the man had fallen--well, he had fallen in a good
cause. He was not the first who had been led astray by the tender, and
therefore pardonable, emotion. What did it matter if she was a Northern
girl and a spy? These were merely added elements to variety and charm.
If he had made a sacrifice of himself, either voluntarily or
involuntarily, it was for a woman, and women understood and forgave.

They wondered what this young officer's name might be--made deft
surmises, and by piecing circumstance to circumstance proved beyond a
doubt that sixteen men were certainly he. It was somewhat tantalizing
that at least half of these men, when accused of the crime, openly
avowed their guilt and said they would do it again. Prescott, who was
left out of all these calculations, owing to the gravity and soberness
of his nature, read the accounts with mingled amusement and vexation.
There was nothing in any of them by which he could be identified, and he
decided not to inquire how the story reached the newspapers, being
satisfied in his own mind that he knew already. The first to speak to
him of the matter was his friend Talbot.

"Bob," he said, "I wonder if this is true. I tried to get Raymond to
tell me where he got the story, but he wouldn't, and as all the
newspapers have it in the same way, I suppose they got it from the same
source. But if there is such a girl, and if she has been here, I hope
she has escaped and that she'll stay escaped."

It was pleasant for Prescott to hear Talbot talk thus, and this opinion
was shared by many others as he soon learned, and his conscience
remained at ease, although he was troubled about Miss Grayson. But he
met her casually on the street about a week afterward and she said:

"I have had a message from some one. She is safe and well and she is
grateful." She would add no more, and Prescott did not dare visit her
house, watched now with a vigilance that he knew he could not escape;
but he wondered often if Lucia Catherwood and he in the heave and drift
of the mighty war should ever meet again.

The gossip of Richmond was not allowed to dwell long on the story of the
spy, with all its alluring mystery of the man and the maid. Greater
events were at hand. A soft wind blew from the South one day. The ice
broke up, the