manded no satisfaction whatever, as
Colonel Wyman had only relieved him of a woman unworthy of his love or
confidence?"

"Yes, that _was_ a little lowering to the dignity of the woman, if she
had any left," said Joe. "But the Kearney elopement--was not _that_
romantic without any drawback? There was something of the wicked old
Paladin, that rattle-heads like myself cannot help admiring, in the
one-armed man whose other limb slept in an honored grave in Mexico,
invading the charmed circle of New York moneyed-respectability,
carrying off the daughter of one of its first lawyers and an
ex-Collector--then submitting to a divorce, marrying the woman who had
trusted all to his honor, and plunging into the fights of Magenta and
Solferino with the same spirit which had led him into the thick of the
conflicts at Chapultepec and the Garita de Belen. Poor Wyman has already
expiated his errors with his life, but I do hope that Kearney may carry
his remaining arm through this miserable war and live to be so honored
that even his one great fault may be forgotten!"

The young girl's eyes flashed, her cheeks were flushed, and any one who
looked upon her at that moment would have believed her almost brave
enough for an Amazon and more than a little warped in her perceptions of
what constituted the right and the wrong of domestic relations. How
little, meanwhile, they would have known her! Ninety-nine out of one
hundred of the women unwilling to confess that they had ever read a page
of the Wyman or the Kearney scandal, and saying "hush!" and "tut! tut!"
to any one who pretended to make the least defence of either--would have
been found infinitely more approachable for any purpose of actual wrong
or vice, than rattling, out-spoken and irrepressible Joe Harris!

Wyman was dead, as she had said--having expiated, with his life, so much
as could be expiated of all past wrong, and having partially hidden the
memory of his crime by his brave offer of satisfaction to the wronged
husband and his unflinching conduct before the enemies of his country in
battle. But how little she thought, at the moment of speaking, that the
bullet was already billeted for the breast of Kearney, and that he was
to fall, but a few weeks after, a sacrifice to his own rashness and the
incapacity of others! Does war indeed have a mission beyond the national
good or evil for which it is instituted? And are its missiles of death
and the diseases to which its exposures