e
who like her. She seems gay and is often brilliant, but I do not think
she is happy. She receives great attention from Mr. Sefton, whose power
in the Government, disguised as it is in a subordinate position, seems
to increase. Whether or not she likes him I do not know. Sometimes I
think she does, and sometimes I think she has the greatest aversion to
him. But it is a courtship that interests all Richmond. People mostly
say that the Secretary will win, but as an old woman--a mere
looker-on--I have my doubts. Helen Harley still holds her place in the
Secretary's office, but Mr. Sefton no longer takes great interest in
her. Her selfish old father does not like it at all, and I hear that he
speaks slightingly of the Secretary's low origin; but he continues to
spend the money that his daughter earns.

"It is common gossip that the Secretary knows all about Lucia's life
before she came to Richmond; that he has penetrated the mystery and in
some way has a hold over her which he is using. I do not know how this
report originated, but I think it began in some foolish talk of Vincent
Harley's. As for myself, I do not believe there is any mystery at all.
She is simply a girl who in these troublous times came, as was natural,
to her nearest relative, Miss Grayson."

* * * * *

"No bad news, Bob, I hope," said Talbot, looking at his gloomy face.

"None at all," said Prescott cheerily, and with pardonable evasion.

"There go the skirmishers again."

A rapid crackle arose from a point far to their left, but the men around
Talbot and Prescott paid no attention to it, merely huddling closer in
the effort to keep warm. They had ceased long since to be interested in
such trivialities.

"Grant's going to move right away; I feel it in my bones," repeated
Talbot.

Talbot was right. That night the cold suddenly fled, the chilly clouds
left the heavens and the great Northern General issued a command. A year
before another command of his produced that terrific campaign through
the Wilderness, where a hundred thousand men fell, and he meant this
second one to be as significant.

Now the fighting, mostly the work of sharpshooters through the winter,
began in regular form, and extended in a long line over the torn and
trampled fields of Virginia, where all the soil was watered with blood.
The numerous horsemen of Sheridan, fresh from triumphs in the Valley of
Virginia, were the wings of the Northern for