d
with her ease and indifference of manner.

When she asked him of her brother, Colonel Harley, the brilliant cavalry
commander, whose exploits were recounted in Richmond like a romance, she
showed enthusiasm, her eyes kindling with fire, and her whole face
vivid. Her pride in her brother was large and she did not seek to
conceal it.

"I hear that he is considered one of the best cavalry leaders of the
age," she said, and she looked questioningly at Prescott.

"There is no doubt of it," he replied, but there was such a lack of
enthusiasm in his own voice that his mother looked quickly at him. Helen
did not notice. She was happy to hear the praises of her brother, and
she eagerly asked more questions about him--his charge at this place,
the famous ruse by which he had beaten the Yankees at that place, and
the esteem in which he was held by General Lee; all of which Prescott
answered readily and with pleasure. Mrs. Prescott looked smilingly at
Miss Harley.

"It does not seem fair for a girl to show such interest in a brother,"
she said. "Now, if it were a lover it would be all right."

"I have no lover, Mrs. Prescott," replied Helen, a slight tint of pink
appearing in her cheeks.

"It may be so," said the older woman, "but others are not like you."
Then after a pause she sighed and said: "I fear that the girls of '61
will show an unusually large crop of old maids."

She spoke half humourously of what became in reality a silent but great
tragedy, especially in the case of the South.

The war was prominent in the minds of the two women. Mrs. Prescott had
truly said that knowledge of it in Richmond was vague. Gettysburg, it
was told, was a great victory, the fruits of which the Army of Northern
Virginia, being so far from its base, was unable to reap; moreover, the
Army of the West beyond a doubt had won a great triumph at Chickamauga,
a battle almost as bloody as Gettysburg, and now the Southern forces
were merely taking a momentary rest, gaining fresh vigour for victories
greater than any that had gone before.

Nevertheless, there was a feeling of depression over Richmond. Bread was
higher, Confederate money was lower; the scarcity of all things needed
was growing; the area of Southern territory had contracted, the Northern
armies were coming nearer and nearer, and a false note sometimes rang in
the gay life of the capital.

Prescott answered the women as he best could, and, though he strove to
keep a bold tem