The fiery July noon was blazing over the unsheltered depot platform, where everybody was in the agony of trying to compress half an hour's work into the fifteen minutes' stop of the long express train. The day was so hot that even the group of idlers which usually formed the still life of the picture was out of sight on the shady side of the buildings. Hackmen bustled noisily about; baggage masters were busier and crosser than ever; there was the usual mÊlÉe of leave-takings and greetings. With the choking dust and scalding glare of the sun, the whole scene might have been an anteroom to Tophet.

From the car window, Clement Moore, brown, hollow-cheeked, and clad in army blue, looked out with weary eyes on all the confusion. Half asleep in the parching heat, visions of cool, green forest depths, and endless ripple of leaves, of the ceaseless wash and sway of salt tides, drifted across his brain, and rapt him out of the sick, comfortless present. But they vanished like a flash with the sudden cessation of motion, and the reality of his surroundings came back with a great shock. Captain George, coming in five minutes after with a glass of iced lemonade in one hand and a half dozen letters in the other, found necessary so much of cheer and comfort as lay in—

'Keep courage, Clement, old fellow, it's only a few hours longer now.'

And then he fell to reading his epistles, testifying his disapprobation of their contents presently by sundry grunts, ending finally in a 'Confound it!' given explosively and an explanation:

'Too bad, Moore! Here am I taking you home to get well in peace and quiet, and Ellen has filled the house up with half a dozen girls, more or less. Writes me to come home and be 'made a lion of;' as sensible as most women!' And the grumble subsided. He broke out again shortly: 'Louise Meller—Lois Berkeley—Susy—' the other names were drowned in the rattle of the starting train. The captain finished his letters, and Clement Moore took up his broken dreams, but this time with a new element.

Lois Berkeley. With the name came back a fortnight of the last summer—perfect bright days, far-off skies filled with drifting fleets of sunny vapor, summer green piled deep over the land, the gurgle of falling waters, the shimmer of near grain fields, deep-hued flowers glowing in the garden borders, all the prodigality of splendor that July pours over the world. And floating through these memories, scarce recognized, but giving hue and tone to them like a far-off, half-heard strain of music—a woman's presence. By some fine, subtile harmony, such as spirits recognize, all the summer glow and depth of color, as it came back to him, came only as part of an exquisite clothing and setting for a slender figure and dark face. All the dainty adaptations of nature were but an expression, in a rude, material way, for those elegances and fitnesses which surrounded her, and which were as natural to her very existence as to the birds and flowers. Only a fortnight, and in that fortnight every look and word of hers, every detail of dress, even to the texture of the garments she wore, were indelibly fixed in his memory. She was so daintily neat in everything, nothing soiled or coarse ever came near her. Careless, too, he thought, remembering how, coming through the parlor in the evening dusk, he had entangled himself in the costly crape shawl left trailing across a chair, of the gloves he had picked up fluttering with the leaves on the veranda, and the handkerchiefs always lying about. Perhaps Clement Moore was over critical in his fancies about ladies' dresses, and felt that inner perfect cleanliness and refinement worked itself out in such little matters as the material and color and fit of garments, and all the trifles of the toilet. A soiled or rumpled article of attire showed a dangerous lack of something that should make up the womanly character. He had not reduced all these unreasonable men's notions to a system by which to measure femininity. He did not even know he had them. An excessive constitutional refinement and keenness of perception made him involuntarily look for such scrupulous delicacy as belonging of course to every woman he was thrown in contact with. He had always been disappointed, at first with a feeling of half disgust with himself and others, that his dreams were so different from the reality. It drove him apart from the sex, and gained him the reputation of being shy or ill natured. After finding that disappointments repeated themselves, he accepted them as the natural order of events, let his fancies go as the beau ideal that he was to seek for through life, and became the polished, unimpressible man of society.

But this little Yankee girl had of a sudden realized his ideal. Something in their first meeting, momentary though it was, and strange according to conventional notions, struck the chord in his heart that was waiting silent for the magic fingers that knew the secret of waking it. If he had fancied that those fingers would never come, or coming, never find it, that something in his unhappy birth set him apart with that strange pain of yearning as his portion in life, and so had tried to forget or choke the want under commonplace attachments and ties, he was no worse than, nor different from, the rest of humanity. But all humanity does not meet trial as unflinchingly and honorably—does not put temptation out of its way as purely and honestly as did this undisciplined life. It is hard to take at once the path that duty orders: we linger to play with possibilities, shed some idle tears, waste life before the necessity, and go back to everyday work weakened and scarred and aching. And once or twice in a lifetime that black, hopeless never drops down, not the less grievous and inexorable because simply a moral obligation.

Well, only babies cry for the moon. Anything clearly impossible and out of our reach we very soon cease sighing for. Men do not cherish a passion which they recognize as utterly hopeless; and Clement Moore, being a man, and moreover an honorable one, put this summer idyl out of his head and heart with all despatch. 'All blundering is sin.' If he had blundered in allowing it to take such hold of his life, he expiated the sin bravely. Sympathies bud and blossom with miraculous quickness in this tropical atmosphere of affinity. He did not know till the excitement of actual presence was over, and he had time to think soberly, in the dead blank and quiet that followed, how it had grown to be a part of his very existence. But whether that part was to be just a pleasant remembrance through the dusty and hot years before him, or whether it was to go deeper and wring his heart with bitterest sense of loss, he did not quite realize. At any rate there was a risk in dwelling on it. He had no more right to be running that risk than he had to be trifling with a cup of deadliest poison; and so he shut away all the golden-winged fancies that had sprung into life with those long, fervid days. Shut them away and sealed their prison place. If they were dead, or pleading for freedom in his still moments, he never asked nor thought. He came back from his lounging summer trip with a certain new, strange drive of purpose in him never seen before. The many events that had crowded themselves into the next year did not smother his prisoners. He never saw their corpses or thought of them sneeringly, and by that sign knew they existed still. But dust and all the desolation of desertion gathered about the hidden chamber that he never recurred to now. Still he kept away from its neighborhood; at first setting a guard of persistent physical action. He was always reading or writing or going somewhere with a kind of hidden, misty aim in his most objectless journeys. After—as the necessity for such occupation wore away, and he lapsed back into the old listless ways of dreaming—his thoughts were always busy with the future; never now did he indulge in those wayward dreams of old. They had a dangerous tendency to take a certain forbidden way. Finally, this self-control became a habit, and he scarcely felt its necessity. The 'might have been' never came back more poignantly than as a vague, shadowy regret, that gave everything a slightly flat and unpalatable taste. But he did not take life any less fully, or with any abatement of whatever earnestness was in him.

Men are not patient under sickness, at least not that unquestioning, unresisting patience which most women and the lower animals show. These especially who are usually well and robust are a trial to the flesh and spirit of those about them. Moore was not the wonderful exception. His first few weeks in the hospital were not so bad; but when the actual racking pain was over, and nothing remained but that halting of the physical machinery to which we never give a thought during perfect action—the weakness hanging leaden weights to every limb, the unwonted nervousness and irritability, the apparently causeless necessity for inaction—he was anything but a resigned man. Captain George, getting his furlough and carrying him off, was blessed from the deepest heart of the ward nurses. He had a kind of feeling that this his first illness was a matter in which the universe should be concerned, and with that fretful self-exaggeration came that other unutterable yearning that attends the first proof that we are coheirs with others to the ills flesh is heir to, weary homesickness and childish desire for sympathy.

So now, weakened physically with that strange new heartsickness, paralyzing his will and giving freer scope to is feverish impatience, George's careless words had rolled away the stone from the sepulchre, and its prisoners were free. Not dead, not having lost a shade of color from their wings, they nestled and gleamed through his heart, filling the summer day with just such intangible perfect witchery as those other days had been full of. Perhaps, too, time and absence had heightened the charm. Imagination has such a way of catching up little scenes and words and looks, and, without altering one of the facts, haloing them with such a golden deceptive atmosphere, adding, day by day, faintest touches, that they grow by and by into a something wholly different. So that fortnight came back to him, an illuminated poem, along rich strains of music, making every nerve thrill with the pleasure-pain of its associations.

And by degrees, as the tide of sensation, thinned itself, lying back with closed eyes, while the long train swept on through the torrid day, separate pictures came before his inner sight. Just as keen and clear were they as when they first fell on his vision. He had not blurred nor dimmed their outlines with frequent recalling and suggestions of difference.

A narrow strip of gray sand, ribbed with the wave wash to the very foot of the reddish brown bowlders that bounded it. Standing thereon a slender woman's figure, clad in quiet gray. The face was turned toward him—a dark, unflushed face, with calm, fixed mouth, and clear gray eyes under straight-drawn brows and long, separate, lashes. Fine, lustreless, silky hair was pushed back into a net glittering with shining specks under the narrow-brimmed straw hat. A face full of a waiting look, not hopeful nor expectant, simply unsettled and watchful, yet fresh, and rounded with the dimples and childlike curves of eighteen. Whatever of yearning and unrest the years had brought lingered only about the shadowy eyes and fine mouth. There were no haggard nor worn outlines, and a baby's skin could not have been softer and finer.

At her feet crisped the shining ripples of the incoming tide. Far beyond, calm and burnished, stretched the summer sea into the dreamy distance, where the white noon sky, stricken through with intensest light and heat, dropped down a palpitating arch to meet it. And in all the dazzle of blue and white and silver and bare shining gray, she stood, a straight, slender, haughty little figure, as indefinite of color as all the rest; all but a narrow strip of scarlet at her throat, falling in a flaming line to her waist. The shimmering atmosphere seemed to pant about her; and through the high noon, over the still waters and sleeping shore, hummed the peering strains of a weird little song. She was singing softly:

'For men must work and women must weep,
And the sooner 'tis over the sooner to sleep.'

In the long parlor, the leaf ghosts that had all day long been flitting in, were darkening with the sunset and filling the room with twilight dimness. Deep in a crimson couch and haloed with the last brightness, lay the long, white outlines of a reclining figure. A handful of Japan lilies burned against the pure drapery, and another handful of tea violets lay crushed in the fleecy handkerchief on the floor. Against the cushions the exquisite contour of the sleeping face showed plainly. Coolest quiet sphered the whole figure; not a suggestion of anything but slowest calm grace disturbed its repose. But with the hushing rustle of leaves with the summer murmur flowing in, seemed to come also the deep monotone of the waves, when this inanimate statue was striking out at his side through the rattle and rush of the surf, the wide eyes filled with fierce light, the whole face fixed and stern with the strain of heart muscle, toward the helpless shape shooting out on the undertow. He had not seen her after, and, coming to seek her that night with words of compliment and thanks, he was met by this white vision that had absorbed all the fire and force of the afternoon into its blankness.

A depot platform—long afternoon shadows fell over the pretty country station—standing alone in the woods. The small, temporary bustle about the waiting train was not discordant with the dreamy, restful look of the whole picture. Then the culminating hurry, the shriek and rattle of the starting train—a little figure poising itself for an instant on the car step—a face flushed a little, and dark eyes brightened with a flash of surprised recognition—a quick gesture of greeting and farewell, and then she was gone into the purple shades of evening.

Once again he had seen her, but from afar off, in the glare and heat of a crowded assembly room. The face was a little thinner now, and the eyes were looking farther away than ever. The blood-red light of rubies flashed in the soft lace at her throat and wrists, and dropped in glittering pendants against the slender neck. She was talking evidently of a brilliant bouquet of pomegranates and daphnes that lay in her lap, swinging dreamily the dainty, glittering white fan. And while he looked, she drew away the heavy brocade she wore, from under a careless tread—a slight, slow motion, wholly unlike the careless sweeps of other women. The imperious nature that thrilled her even to the tips of the long fingers, manifested itself, as inborn natures always do, under the deepest disguises, in just this unconscious, most trifling of acts; and, remembering the gesture, he asked, with words far lighter than the tone or feeling:

'As much of a princess as ever?'

And Captain George answered:

'As much of a princess!' both unmindful that no word had been spoken to token who was in the thought of each.

Very trifling things these were to remember. Very likely he had seen scores of far more graceful and memorable scenes; but just these trifles, coming back so vividly, proved to him, as nothing else could have done, with what a keen, intense sympathy every word and look of hers had been noted.

The spoken words roused him. In the ride that followed, twenty different persons and things came into their talk; but never once the princess. That, arousing himself again from his half-dreamful lapse from the old guarded habit, was put away steadily and quietly. His battle had been fought once. He was not to weaken his victory with fancies of the 'might have been.' He had not been tempted, through all these months; he would not tempt himself, now that real trial was so near at hand. Man as he was, if escape had been possible, he would have fled. But there was nothing to do but to go forward, and he called up that old, mighty, intangible safeguard of honor. The matter was settled beyond any question of surprise—he must avoid the long, sapping days of contact, the wasting, feverish yearnings of absence coming after.

Flying over miles and miles of the summer land, heaped with the red tangled sweets of clover fields, belted with white starry mayweed, blue with marshy growth of wild flag, with hazy lines of far-off hills, fading into purple depths of distance, and near low ones lying green and calm close beside them, with brown clear brooks, famous trout streams, after the New England fashion, went running across their way, the old home pride leaped up in George's eyes and voice, and even Moore forgot his weariness, and talked with a flash of the old, careless spirit.

The hack that brought them to their destination left them, deep in the summer night, at the foot of the long avenue of elms—going up which, with slow steps, on a sudden the house broke on them, ablaze with lights, athrob with music, whereat there was a renewal of explosive utterances, and the captain led his friend to the rear of the house to insure a quiet entrance.

From the dark piazza, where he waited while George summoned some one to receive them, he caught, through the long, open casement, the vista of the parlors, with their glitter and confusion of light drapery and glimpses of bright faces and light forms, and softened hum of voices, as the dancers circled with the music. And through it all, straight down toward him, floating in one of the weird Strauss waltzes, came the princess, swathed in something white, airy, wide-falling. The same dark, unflushed face, the same wide, far-looking eyes, and fixed mouth, the same silky falling hair, but cut short now, and floating back as she moved. It was only for a moment: the perfumed darkness that seemed to throb with a sudden life of its own, the great, slow, summer stars above him, the wailing, passionate music that came trembling out among the heavy dew-wet foliage, the dark, calm earth about him, and the light and color and giddy motion that filled the gleaming square before him, struck in on his senses with staggering force; and then she swayed out of his sight, and Mrs. Morris came forward with words of cheer and welcome.

That night, lying sleepless after the music was hushed and the wheels had done rolling away from the door, as if material enough for all fever fancies had not been given, backward and forward through the corridor a woman's garments trailed with light rustle, and a low voice hummed brokenly the waltz he had heard. Ceasing by and by in a murmur of girls' voices, and the old-remembered air, sung softly:

'For men must work and women must weep,
Though storms be sudden and waters deep.'

After that many days went by unmarked. His wound, aggravated by fatigue, racked him with renewed pain; and when that was over, vitality was at too low an ebb for anything but the most passive quiet. Before listless, unnoting eyes drifted the crystal mornings, the golden hours steeped deep in summer languors, the miracles of sun-settings and star-filled holy nights. From his window he saw and heard always the ocean, blue and calm, lapping the shore with dreamy ripple in bright days—driving ghostly swirls of spray and fog clown the beach in stormy, gray ones. The house itself seemed set in the deepest haunt of summertime. Great trees, draped in the fullest growth of the year, rippled waves of green high about it. All day long the leaf sounds and leaf shadows came drifting in at the windows. Perfectest hush and quiet wrapped its occasional faint strains of music, or chime of voices came up to him, but did not break the silence. A place for a well soul to find its full stature, for a tired or sick one to gather again its lost forces. And by slow degrees the life held at first with so feeble a grasp came back to him.

By and by there came a day when, from his balcony, he witnessed a departure, full of girls' profuse adieux, and then the hush of vacancy fell on the wide halls and airy rooms of the great house. That evening, with slow steps, he came down the staircase. In the twilight of the parlors showed dimly outlined a drift of woman's drapery, and the piano was murmuring inarticulately. Outside, on the broad stone doorstep, showed another drift, resolving itself into the muslins of Miss Nelly Morris, springing up with glad words of welcome as his unsteady frame came into view. Before half the protracted and vehement hand shaking was over, Moore turned at a soft rustle behind him, and Nelly found her introduction forestalled. Moore hoped, with his courtliest reverence, that Miss Berkeley had not forgotten him.

She made two noiseless steps forward, and put out a small, brown band. He took it in his left, with a smiling glance of apology at the sling-fettered right arm. It was not often that Miss Berkeley's broad lids found it worth their while to raise themselves for such a wide, clear look as they allowed with the clasp. And then Nelly broke in:

'Then you two people know each other. Grand! And I've been wondering these two weeks what to do with you! Why didn't you tell me, Leu?'

'How was I to identify Mr. Moore with 'George's friend from the army'? Mr. Moore remembers he was on debatable ground last summer.'

Her soft, slow speech fell on his hearing like the silver ripple of water, clear and fine cut, but without a bit of the New England incisiveness of tone that filled his delicate Southern ear with slight, perpetual irritation.

'But I've made my calling and election sure at last. I was transformed into a mudsill and Northern hireling last spring.'

'In spite of the transformation, I recognized you as soon as you spoke. I was not quite willing to be forgotten, you see, by any one who wore the glorifying army cloth.'

They were out on the veranda now. Nelly was gazing with pitiful eyes at the sleeve fastened away, while the wasted left hand drew forward a great wicker chair into the circle of the moonlight. He caught the look:

'Not so very bad, Miss Nelly; not off, you see, only useless for the present;' and he took a lowly seat at her side, near the princess's feet.

'You are guiltless of shoulder straps. You might have obtained a commission, I think. Why didn't you, I wonder,' she said speculatively.

'Because I knew nothing of military matters, for one thing, and hadn't the assurance to take my first lesson as lieutenant or captain.'

Miss Berkeley's white lids lifted themselves again.

'More nice then wise, sir. Others do it,' was Nelly's comment.

'Yes, but I haven't forgotten the old copy-book instructions, 'Learn to obey before you command,' and began at the beginning. I've taken the first step toward the starred shoulder straps'—he wore the corporal's stripes—' and am hopeful.'

'You'll never attain to them, you lazy Southron. Tell as about your camp life.'

'There's very little to tell. Drill, smoke, loaf—begging your pardon for the rough expression of a rough fact—drill again. As one day is, so is another; they're all alike.'

'Well, tell us about your getting wounded, then, and the fight. George will not get wounded himself, in spite of my repeated requests to that effect.'

And so Moore fought his battle over again, in the midst of which Miss Berkeley dropped out of the talk, folded some soft brilliant net over her light dress, and went down the walk leading to the shore, and he did not see her again that night.

After that he spent much of his time below stairs. Much alone; there were walks and rides in which he could take no part. Despite of George's prediction, he had peace and quiet, and gathered strength hourly. Whatever of graciousness he had seen or fancied in Miss Berkeley's manner in that first unexpected meeting had all vanished. A subtile, unconquerable something shut her out from all friendliness of speech or action. She went about the house in her slow, abstracted way, or in her other mood, with sudden darting motions like a swallow, or dreamed all day beside the summer sea, coming back browner and with mistier looks in her gray eyes, but always alone and unapproachable. So that in half a dozen days he had not received as many voluntary sentences from her.

But one morning the clouds had gathered black and heavy. The sea fogs had pitched their tents to landward, and their misty battalions were driving gray across the landscape. Dim reaches of blank water—lay beyond, weltering with an uneasy, rocking motion against the low, dark sky. White, ghostly sea birds wheeled low, a fretful wind grieved about the house, and a New England northeast storm was in progress. She was standing at the window, looking out with eyes farther away than ever over the haze-draped sea. Some fine, heavy material, the same indistinct hue as the day outside, fell about her in large, sweeping folds. A breath of sudden, penetrating perfume struck across his senses as he approached her. 'And gray heliotrope!' he said; but the heliotrope vanished as she turned and displayed the blaze of carnations at her throat, and the gleam of crimson silk under the jaunty zouave.

'Lois Pearl Berkeley,' he read from the golden thimble he had nearly crushed under foot. He half wondered if she would know what it was. He never saw her do anything. She was never 'engaged,' nor in haste about any occupation. The perfect freedom from the universal Yankee necessity of motion, with which the brown, small hands fell before her, was as thoroughly a part of her as the strange Indian scent which clung to everything she touched, and sphered her like the atmosphere of another world. He never could associate the idea of any kind of personal care-taking with her dainty leisure, more than with the lilies of the field, though they never appeared in as many graceful arrays as she.

'Yes, mine, thank you,' she said, and composedly dropped it into its place in the most orderly of useless conglomerations of silken pockets and puzzling pigeon holes. He watched her fingers, and then looked back at her.

'Lois—such an odd name for you—such a quaint, staid Puritan name.'

'And I am neither quaint nor staid nor Puritan. Thank you. Yes, my mother must have had recollections of her New England home strong on her when she gave it me, down on the Louisiana shores. It always sounded even to me a little strange and frigid among such half-tropical surroundings.'

As she spoke a sudden pang of utter weariness and longing seized him. A rush of the boyish malady of homesickness, concentrated from all the dreary months of his long absence, and none the less poignant because it was involuntary. The wide, cool, shadowy halls of his mother's house, always aglow with blossoms and haunted with their odors, all the superficial lotus-charm of Southern life—and he had lived it superficially enough to catch all its poetry rose before him. It caught away his breath and choked sudden tears into his eyes. Came and went like a flash—for before she had done speaking a sudden new bond of sympathy put away the stranger forevermore, and he was no longer alone.

'Then you are Southern born too,' he said, with a quick step forward, and involuntarily outstretched hand. Hers dropped into it.

'Yes, I am hardly acclimated yet. I shiver under these pale Northern skies from August till June. O my Louisiana, you never made 'life a burden' with such dark, chill days, and sobbing, cruel winds!' She turned to the windows. A sudden uncontrollable quaver of impatience and longing ran through her speech and hurried the words with unusual vehemence.

'I thought you must have liked the day, since you robed yourself in its haze and mist.' He laid his hand lightly on her gray drapery with reverent touch.

'And I thought my carnations would redeem that. Since they didn't—'and she tossed the whole bright, spicy handful on the table.

In a vase on the mantle, gray, passionate, odorous blooms were massed loosely about a cluster of fragile, intense day lilies, and a dash of purple and crimson trailed with the fuchsias over its edge, and gleamed up from the white marble ledge. He went to the vase, shook out the fuchsias, and laid the residue in her lap.

'Heliotrope, finally,' he said.

She brushed it lightly away with a half shudder.

'Not that. I don't like heliotrope. Its perfume is heart-breaking, hopeless. It belongs in coffins, about still, dead faces. If it had a voice, we should hear continual moans. It would be no worse than this, though.'

'You will wear the lilies then, unless the heliotrope scent clings to them too,' he said, gathering up the obnoxious flowers.

'Yes, if it doesn't jar your ideal to see them worn against such a stormy day dress. To me they are the perfection of summer. No color could be more intense than this spotless whiteness. There!' Fastening them, the brittle stems snapped, and the flowers fell at her feet. 'No flowers for me to-day, of your choosing at least. Practically, lilies have such an uncomfortable way of breaking short off.'

A broad, bright ribbon lay drawn through 'Charles Anchester' on the table. She knotted it carelessly at her throat.

'That will do for the now; but, O my carnations, how your mission failed!' hovering over them a minute.

'Then you are not satisfied with the New England mean of perfection, in everything, mentally, morally, and meteorologically?' going back to the weather again.

'Satisfied! I'd exchange this whole pale summer for one hour of broad, torrid noonlight. Deep, far-off tropical skies, great fronds of tropical foliage, drawing their sustenance from the slowest, richest juices of nature, gorgeous depths of color blazing with the very heart of the sun, deep, intoxicating odors poured from creamy white or flaming flower chalices, and always the silver-sprayed wash of the blue sea. I remember that of my home. It is months and months since I have seen a magnolia or jasmine.'

Fate sent Miss Morris to the parlor just then, luckily enough, perhaps, and the first dash of rain from the coming storm struck the windows sharply. Miss Berkeley shivered; a gray shadow swept up over her face, and absorbed all the gleam and unrest. She moved off with her book to a window; shut herself out from the room, and into the storm, with a heavy fall of curtains; and Nelly's voice rippled through a tripping, Venetian barcarole.

It stormed all the next day, and when twilight came, it rained still with desperation. A narrow sphere of light from the flame low down in its alabaster shade held the piano, and through the warm scented gloom that filled the rest of the parlor thrilled echoing chords. Moore, coming in, stopped in the dimness to listen. A troubled uncertainty made itself felt through the strains, a sudden discordant crash jarred through the room, and the performer rose abruptly. He came forward.

'O my prophetic soul, magnolias!' said Nelly, from her lounge, just outside the lighted circle.

It had just come from him, the light, exquisite basket he held filled with great, pink, flushed magnolia blooms. Nelly raved in most fashionably extravagant adjectives. Lois looked at it with hungry eyes, but motionless and speechless. He laid it before her on the table, and turned away. She stood for a moment looking gravely down on it, then buried her face among the cool petals with a sudden caressing motion. Looking up again shortly, 'Thank you,' she said simply to the giver chatting carelessly.

A broad illumination flooded the other end of the parlor a minute after, and the chess board came into requisition. If Miss Morris found little skill necessary to discomfit her opponent, and wondered thereat, she could not see, as he saw, a dark face, bowed on tropic blooms, flushed with unwonted glad color, lips apart and aquiver, wide eyes lustrous with purple light, shining through the tears that gathered in them.

Then the piano began, played dreamily, irregularly, with slender, single threads of tune, and frequent pauses, as if the preoccupied mind let the listless fingers fall away from the keys. They gathered up finally all the broken strains into a low, slow-moving harmony. Through it Moore heard the soft lap of waves, the slow rock of Pacific tidal swells, flowing and ebbing and flowing again through flaming noons, about half-submerged bits of world, palm-shaded, sun-drenched, or swaying white with moonlight under purple midnights, holy with the clear burning stars: heard the gurgle and ripple of falling streams, deepening into the wide flow of mighty rivers, bearing in their calm sweep the secrets of a zone—of ice-choked springs, of the dead stillness of Northern forests, and the overgrowth, and passionate life of endless summers.

The red and white combatants now held truce over a queen check, while the players sat silent, listening.

Suddenly, through the murmur and rhythmic flow of water sounds, struck shrill and sharp the opening strains of a march—not such marches as mark time for dainty figures crowding ballroom floors, but triumphant, cruel, proud, with throbbing drum-beat—steadying the tramp of weary feet over red battle fields. Its unswerving hurry, its terrible, calm excitement, brought before his vision long blue lines—the fixed faces sterner than death, with steady eyes and quickened breath—the nervous clutch of muskets, as the rattle of small arms and boom of cannon came nearer and nearer, the fluttering silken banners, the calm sunshine, and sweet May breath—and the quick, questioning note of a meadow lark dropped down through the silence of the advancing column. As the maddening music stormed and beat about him, his heart throbbed audibly, and the rushing currents of his fiery Southern blood sounded in his ears. Honor, prudence, resolution, everything was swept away in the lava tide of excitement. Before him he saw the crown of his life. All heaven and all earth should not stop him short of it. He rose and began crossing the room, with heavy, resolute tread. In the dimness, the player was hardly visible; he would assure himself of her mortality at least. A sudden, fierce hunger for sight and touch thrilled him.

Midway he stopped. The music dropped with a shock from its fiery enthusiasm. Was it only an echo, or an army of ghosts crossing a dim field, long since fought over—the steady tramp, tramp, the pendulum of time? Unutterably wailing, pitiful, it sent plaintive, piercing cries up to the calm, dead heavens. All the fearful sights he had seen rose before him. Upturned lay faces calm in death as in a child's sleep, with all camp roughnesses swept away in that still whiteness; strong men's, with that terrible scowl of battle or the distortion of agonized death on them—mangled and crushed forms—all the wreck of a fought battle, terrible in its suggestive pathos. It sank away into the minor of water voices, soft, monotonous, agonizing in its utter passivity, a brilliant arpeggio flashed up the keys like a shower of gold, and Miss Berkeley rose with white face and trembling breath, and Nelly was alone in the room, sobbing nervously in her armchair.

The storm passed that night, with great swayings of trees, and dash of broad raindrops, and piled up broken masses of fleecy white clouds, tossed about by the rough, exultant September wind. Bright days followed, mellowing with each one to sunnier, calmer perfection. Moore passed them in his own room. That night had torn away all the disguises that he had put upon his heart. He knew now that he loved this woman—knew it with such a bitter sense of humiliation as such proud spirits writhe under when honor turns traitor and betrays them to the enemy. 'Lead us not into temptation.' If it meant anything in the old habit of child's prayer which clung to him yet, it meant that he should put himself out of its way, since he had proved himself too weak to meet it. His inborn honesty let him build no excuses for his failure. He saw, and acknowledged with a flush of scorn and curling lip, his own treachery to himself in his hour of need. That he had not committed himself—that his self-betrayal was only known to self—was no merit of his—simply a circumstance. And circumstances seemed mighty in their influence upon him, he thought, with a feeling of deepest contempt. All pride and self-reliance were taken out of him. Absence, at least, would be a safeguard, since it would render harmless such impulses as those of that night. However much he might sin in yearning, she; should never know, never be exposed to the risk of being drawn into his guilt and pain. He had come at last to the place where all the old delicate pride was merged in the one anxious fear that she should suffer. He would go away the next day; he would not see her again—never see her voluntarily—putting away fiercely the sudden pang of yearning: not that he came at once to such a conclusion.

Honor, pride, self-respect, having failed him once, were not easily recalled to their allegiance. His was no feeble nature, to sin and repent in an hour. He fought over every inch of his way, and came out at last conqueror, but scarred and weary and very weak in heart, and distrustful of himself.

They had gone to ride that afternoon—he had seen them drive away. He would go down and make the necessary arrangements for his departure. And so it happened that he stood an hour before sunset in the parlor. A sudden heart sickness drove the blood from his lips with the wrench of remembrance. It did not strengthen him to meet her, cool and royal, in filmy purple, putting out her hand with frank friendliness, and with a new quaver of interest in her voice. Those fatal magnolias: all the outside world seemed pressing nearer these two strangers in a strange land.

'How pale you are! You have been ill again.'

'No,' he said, almost harshly. 'You like tiger lilies,' lifting a stem crowded with the flaming whirls.

'Like them? yes—don't you? As I like the fiery, deafening drum-roll and screaming fife, and silver, sweet bugle-calls. Think where they found these wide, free curves of outline—that flaming contrast of color. Indian skies have rounded over them, Indian suns poured their fervor into their hearts. In the depth of forest jungles the velvet-coated tiger has shaken off their petals—glittering, deadly cobras crushed them in their slow coils; gorgeous-winged birds and insects swept them in their flight.'

Some new mental impulse sent a rare, faint flush to the olive cheeks, and filled the uplooking clear eyes with light. This purple-clad shape, with fiery nasturtiums burning on the breast and filling the air with their peculiar odor, with the barbaric splendor of tiger lilies reflecting their lurid glare about her as she stood, bore no more likeness to the ordinary haughty woman than fire to snow. He would have liked to have crowned her with pomegranate blossoms—have dropped the silvery sheen of ermine under her feet, and have knelt there to worship.

She moved away impatiently, trailed her noiseless drapery through the room once or twice, and came back to the window, where he stood looking out. Before them lay the sea, calm in a sheen of blue, gathering faint amethystine vapors, that the sunset would light up in a miracle of bronze and purple and rose.

'You should have been with us last night! A soft, rushing south wind filled all the air with whispers, and drew up a veil of lace round the horizon, very high up in the east. Stars were few; the new moon dropped tender, faint beams down into the gray mist and grayer water that broke in ripples of white fire against the dark in the west, and mingled with the mystery in the east. I want to go again. Mr. Moore, I can manage a boat; will you go with me?'

With every minute he saw his hard-earned victory slipping away. With every minute his reeling sense lost foothold in the strange, new fascination of her excited presence. Will rallied to a last effort; he muttered some broken excuse, that she must have thought an assent, for she dropped a soft, white, clinging shawl over her shoulders, slipped the tie of the jaunty hat beneath her chin, and he could only follow her as she slid through the flicker of shade and sunshine down to the beach, where the summer sea washed lazily.

Low in the west and northwest lay piled ominous clouds; white, angry thunder heads began showing themselves.

'A grand sunset for to-night, and a shower perhaps. We shall be back before it breaks.'

A small boat—a frail thing of white and gilding—floated at anchor. Lois shook out the sail in her character of manager, seated herself at the helm, and they drifted out. No word was spoken; the light in her eyes grew brighter and brighter; the scarlet curves of her mouth more and more intense. Sitting with face turned away from the west, she did not see, as he did, the rising blackness. The wind freshened, skimming in fitful gusts over the waves, and the little craft flung off the spray like rain. Away off in the shadow of the cloud the water was black as death, a faint line of white defining its edge. Was she infatuated? As for him, he grew very calm, with a kind of desperation. Better to die so, with her face the last sight on earth—his last consciousness her clinging arms, sinking down to the dark, still caverns beneath—than to live out the life that lay before him. He leaned forward and looked over into the green depths of the sea. Sunshine still struck down in rippling lines, a golden network. Soft emerald shadows hung far down, breaking up into surface rifts of cool dimness as the waves swung over them.

Her hat had fallen back; her whole face was alive with a proud, exultant delight in the exhilarating motion. Higher and higher rose the veil of cloud, and the blackness in the water was creeping toward them. Sea birds wheeled low about them, with their peculiar quavering cry, and a low swell made itself felt. Miss Berkeley turned her head; a sudden look of affright blanched her face to deadliest whiteness. A hand's breadth of clear sky lay beneath the sun, and down after them, with the speed of a racer, came that great black wave. Before it the blue ripples shivered brightly; behind it the angry water tossed and seethed. In its bosom, lurid, phosphorescent lights seemed to flit to and fro. Its crest was ragged and white with dashes of foam. She took in the whole in a second's glance, and made a movement to bring the boat's head up to the wind. As the white face turned toward him, a quick instinct of self-preservation seized him, and he sprang up to lower the sail. Something caught the halliards. His left arm was of little service; his right hung useless at his side. She reached forward—one hand on the tiller—to help him. The rim of the storm slipped up over the sun—a sudden flaw struck them—the rudder flew sharp round, wrenched out of her slight hold—the top-heavy sail caught the full force of the blow, surged downward with a heavy lurch, and the gale was on them. A great blow, and swift darkness, then fierce currents rushing coldly past him; strange, wild sounds filling his ears; and when his vision cleared itself, he saw Lois, unimpeded by her light drapery, striking out for the sunken ledge, half a dozen yards away, over which the spray was flying furiously. He ground his teeth with impatience as his nerveless arm fell helpless; but he reached her side at last. A narrow shelf, with barely sufficient standing room for two. Great, dark waves, with strange lights flashing through them, whirled blinding deluges high above their heads, as he held her close. With the instinct of the weaker toward the stronger, she grasped and clung to him; and the fierce exultation that thrilled through his veins with actual contact, made him strong as a giant. And then, close on the gale, came the rain, beating down the waves with its heavy pour. In the thunder and tramp of the storm no human voice could have made itself audible, if speech had been needed.

The storm passed as suddenly as it had risen. Through a rift in the clouds a dash of blood-red light burst over the troubled waters, and with it a sudden quiet fell about them. They were to have their 'grand sunset' finally.

'We are too far from the mainland to reach it without help; no boats are likely to pass this way after this storm; the tide is at its lowest now; it rises high over this ledge.'

In his quiet voice a half-savage triumph made itself heard. This near-coming fate, that he believed inevitable, put away completely all claims of that world that lay behind him—shut out everything but their own individuality. Time had narrowed to a point; all landmarks were swept away.

Miss Berkeley's face had lost none of its whiteness; but the pallor was not of fear. The great eyes burned star-like, and the mouth was like iron. She looked up as his even tones fell on her ear. Something in his gaze fixed hers; through fearless, unveiled eyes, the soul looked straight out to his. What he saw there dazzled and blinded him. He caught her up to his heart suddenly and fiercely. His lips crushed hers in a long, clinging kiss, that seemed to drink up her very life. For them, the brightness that for others is dissipated over long years of the future, was concentrated into the single intense moment of the present—this one moment, that seemed to burst into bud and blossom, the fruition of a lifetime. The sky lifted away and poured down fuller floods of light; the air vibrated with strange, audible throbs. When he released her, she did not move away. Never again, though they lived out a century, could the past be quite what it had been before; through it they had come to this, the crowning perfection of their lives. Through the future would run the memory of a caress in which—she was not a woman who measured her gifts—she had dissolved all the hope and promise of that future for him. Desperation was no small element in the whirl. Only into the eternities could he carry the now pure and loyal. It had nothing to do with time; only through the shadow of the coming death had he attained to it.

The fancy that had always haunted him with her peculiar name and dainty presence, prompted the 'Marguerite!'

She was not a woman to whom people give pet names. A rested, loving smile gleamed over her face, and her lips sought his again.

'My darling!'

'Mine!' and then time drifted on, unbroken by the speech which would have jarred the new, perfect harmony. Neither thought—the life currents that had met so wildly and suddenly, left space in their full, disturbed flow, for just the one consciousness of delirious, satisfying love. While the fiery sunset paled, he held the little drenched figure close, her warm breath flowing across his cheek.

Out of the gathering dimness shoreward, came a hail. It struck him with an icy chill that death could never have brought. She raised her head, listening. The longing and temptation to hold her to his breast, and sink down through the green, curling waves, came back stronger than ever. Only so could he hope to keep her. That inexorable future of time reaching out to grasp him back again, would put them apart so hopelessly. His voice was hoarse—broken up with the heart wrench.

'Marguerite, will you die here with me, or go back again to the life that will separate us?'

She did not understand him. Why should she? Did she not love him, and he her? and what could come between them? For her a future burst suddenly into hope with that faint call. In it lay untried, unfathomable sources of happiness.

Another breathless kiss—this time crowded with the agony of a parting for him—and then, as the hail came again, nearer and more distinct, the white shawl, that still clung about her, floated in the air as a signal.

They lifted her into the rescuing boat shortly, white and breathless, and wrapped her in heavy shawls. Not senseless, lying against his breast, the dark eyes opened once to meet his, and the pallid face nestled a little closer to its resting place. He could not tell if the time were long or short, before Nelly's voice broke on his ear.

'Only a comedy, instead of the tragedy which mother is arranging up at the house!'

The half-hysterical quaver broke into the woman's refuge of tears, and sobs with that; and Moore gave up his burden to stronger arms.

'Up at the house,' Mrs. Morris, busied with her blazing fires and multitudinous appliances for any stage of disaster, met them with the quiet tears that mothers learn to shed, and the reverent 'Thank God!' that comes oftenest from mothers' lips.

And the bustle being over, he looked reality and duty straight in the face. The man was in no sense a coward—flinch was not in him. He came out on the upper balcony two hours later, with the face of a man over whom ten years more of life had gone heavily. A dozen steps away sat Marguerite—the white heart of a softened glow of light. She came out at his call quiet and stately, but with a kind of shy happiness touching eye and cheek with light and flame. At sight of her, all the mad passion in his heart leaped up—a groan came in place of the words he had promised himself. He strode away with heavy, hard footfalls. Not strange, since he was trampling Satan and his own heart under his feet. He came back again, quickly, eagerly, as a man forcing himself forward to a mortal sacrifice, who feels that resolution may fail. The words that came finally were half a groan, half an imprecation, hissed through clenched teeth.

'Three years ago, a Louisiana lady promised to be my wife. She is not dead; the engagement is not broken.'

There were no words beyond the plain statement of facts that he had any right to use—harsh and brutal though they seemed. Seen in the earth-light that had broken on him with that rescuing hail, he had acted the coward and villain. If she thought him so, he had no right to demur.

There was no need of other words. The eyes, after their first terrified glance, had fixed themselves out on the night, and then the lids fell, and the wondering, stunned look changed slowly into one of perfect comprehension. Not a muscle moved. The present, leaping forward, laid before her the future, scorched and seared, beyond possibility of bloom again. She looked into it with just the same attitude—even to the tapering fingers laid lightly on the railing—as five minutes before she had dreamed over a land of promise. He, looking down on her white face—whiter in the silver powder of the moonlight—saw a look of utter, hopeless quiet settle there—such quiet as one sees in an unclosed coffin, such marble, impassive calm, neither reproachful nor grieving, as covers deadly wounds—settle never again to rise till Death shall sweep it off. Some lives are stamped at once and forever; and faces gather in an hour the look that haunts them for a lifetime.

Then he knew that no one ever bears the consequences of a sin alone. On this woman, for whom he would have gone to death, he had drawn down the curse. He was powerless to help her; all that he could give—the promise of lifelong love and tenderness—was itself a deadly wrong—would blast his life in giving, hers in receiving. In the minutes that he stood there, gazing into her face, all the waves and billows of bitterest realization of helplessness went over his heart.

She turned to go away. 'Marguerite!' The man's despairing soul, his bitter struggles and failures, atoned for in this last agony, made itself utterance in that one cry. She turned back, without looking up; even his eager gaze could not force up the heavy lids. Then, with that sweet, miraculous woman's grace of patience and pity, she put out her hand, and as he bowed his head over it, touched her lips to his cheek with quick, light contact, and glided away.

Earliest morning shimmered lances of gray, ghostly light on the horizon, and across the sea to the waiting shore. They struck grayest and ghostliest on a high balcony, where a woman's figure crouched, swathed in damp, trailing drapery, with silky, falling hair about a still face, and steadfast eyes that had burned just as steadfastly through the long hours gone by. Great, calm stars, circling slowly, had slipped out of sight into the waves; the restless, grieving ocean had swayed all night with heavy beat against the beach; mysterious whisperings had stirred the broad summer leaves, heavy with dew and moonlight; faint night noises had drifted up to her, leaving the silence unrippled by an echo; till the old moon dropped a wasted, blood-red crescent out of sight, and the world, exhausted with the passion of the yearning night, shrouded itself in the gloom and quiet that comes before the dawn.

To the watcher, who, with strained, unconscious attention, had taken in every change of the night, the promise of the day came almost as a personal wrong. That the glare of the sunshine should fall on her pain—that the necessity for meeting mere acquaintances with the same face as yesterday should exist, now that her life lay so scorched and sere before her, filled her with rebellious impatience.

But when, with the growing light, the first sounds of household waking came to her, she rose wearily, and went, with tired, heavy steps to her own room. And Nelly, coming in half an hour later, with an indefinite sense of uneasiness, found an older face than last evening's on the pillow, with harder lines about the mouth, and with a wearier droop of the eyelids. The voice, too, that answered her good morning, had a kind of echoing dreariness in it. But such traces are not patent to many eyes or ears, and Nelly did not realize them.

There are a few women, mostly of this dark, slender type, who bear these wrenching heart agonies as some animals bear extremest suffering of body—not a sound or struggle testifies to pain—receiving blow after blow without hope or thought of appeal—going off by and by to die, or to suffer back to life alone. Not much merit in it, perhaps—a passive, hopeless endurance of an inevitable torture; but such tortures warp or shape a lifetime. Rarely ever eyes that have watched out such a night see the sun rise with its old promise.

Clement Moore, coming slowly back to life after a fortnight of delirium, found the woods ablaze with October, and Miss Berkeley gone. Another fortnight, and he was with his regiment. Captain George—off on some scouting expedition—was not in camp to meet him. But stretched out on the dry turf a night or two after, through the clash of the band on the hillside above broke Captain George's sonorous voice, and straightway followed such a catalogue of questions as dwellers in camps have always ready to propound to the latest comer from the northward. Concluding finally with—

'And you didn't fall in love with 'the princess'?' Poor Captain George! The prodigious effort ought to have kept the heart throb out of his voice, though it didn't. Moore's quick ear caught it (sympathy has a wonderfully quickening effect on the perceptions sometimes), and he took refuge in a truth that in no way touched the past few months—feeling like a coward and traitor meanwhile, and yet utterly helpless to save either himself or his friend from coming evil. Another item added to retributive justice.

'I thought you knew'—flashing the diamond on his hand in the moonlight—'somewhere beyond the lines yonder a lady wears the companion to this—or did, last spring.'

And George's spirits rose immensely thereupon.

The old, miserable monotony of camp life began again. It wore on him, this machine-like existence, this blind, unquestioning obedience, days and nights of purposeless waiting, brightened by neither hope nor memory. He had hated it before; now he loathed it with the whole strength of his unrestful soul. But it did him good. Brought face to face with his life, he met the chances of his future like the man he was, and at last, out of the blackness end desolation, came the comfort of conquering small, every-day temptations, more of a comfort than we are willing to admit at first thought.

This bare, unbroken life cuts straight down to the marrow of a man. Stripped of all conventionalities, individuals come out broadly. The true metal shows itself grandly in this strange, impartial throwing together of social elements—this commingling on one level of all ranks and conditions of men in the same broad glare of every-day trial, unmodified by any of society's false lights. The factitious barriers of rank once broken over, all early associations, whether of workshop or college, go for nought, or, rather, for what they are worth. The man gravitates to his proper place, whether he makes himself known with the polished sentences of the school, or in terse, sinewy, workman's talk. And through the months Moore learned to respect humanity as it showed itself, made gentler to every one, driven out from himself, perhaps, by the bitterness and darkness that centred in his own heart. It was a new phase of life for him, but he bated his haughty Southern exclusiveness to meet it. Before, he had kept himself aloof as far as the surroundings allowed from those about him—now, his never-failing good nature, his flow of song and story, his untiring physical endurance, all upborne by a certain proud delicacy and reticence, made him a general favorite. But he hailed as a relief the long, exhausting marches that came after a while. Bodily weariness stood in the place of head or heart exercise, and men falling asleep on the spot where they halted for the night, after a day in the clinging Virginia mud, had little time for the noisy outbreaks that filled the evenings in days of inaction. So he did his private's duty bravely, with cheery patience, relieving many a slender boy's arms of his gun, helping many another with words of cheer as he slumped on at his side, always with some device for making their dreary night-stops more endurable. Thanksgiving came and went. George went home on furlough. Moore refused one, and ate the day's extra allowance of tough beef and insipid rice with much fought-against memories of his New England festivals. The winter went on. Christmas days came. The man's brown face was getting positively thinner with homesick recollections of the Southern carnival. This brilliant, ready spirit, who never grew sour nor selfish under any circumstances, actually spent two good hours, the afternoon before Christmas day, in a brown study, and with a suspicious, tightened feeling in his throat, and mistiness in his eyes. Coming in at nightfall from his picket duty, tired and hungry, Jim Murphy, stretching his long length before the fire, rose on his elbow to find half a dozen epistles he had brought down to camp that day.

'Yer letthers, Musther Moore.' Jim, even with his sudden accession of independence as an American citizen, paid unconscious deference to the world-old subtile difference between gentleman and 'rough,' and used the title involuntarily.

He opened them sitting by the same fire, munching his hard tack as he read. Murphy, watching him, saw his lips quiver and work over one bearing half a dozen postmarks—a letter from his mother, conveyed across the lines by some sleight-of-hand of influence or pay, and mailed and remailed from place to place, till weeks had grown into months since it was written. Noncommittal as it had need to be—filled with home items to the last page—there his heart stood still, to bound again furiously back, and his breath came sharp and hot. He rose blinded and staggering. Jim Murphy, seeing how white and rigid his face had grown, came toward him, putting out his hand with a dumb impulse of sympathy, not understanding how the shock of a great hope, springing full grown into existence, sometimes puts on the semblance of as great a loss.

Private Moore's application for a furlough being duly made, that night was duly granted.

'Just in time—the last one for your regiment!' said the good-natured official, registering the necessary items.

In another hour he was whirling away, and in early evening two days later he stepped out into the clear moonlight and crisp air of a Northern city.

A New England sleighing season was at its height. The streets were crowded with swift-flying graceful vehicles, the air ringing with bell music and chimes of voices. Out through the brilliant confusion he went to the quiet square where the great trees laid a dark tracery of shadow upon the snow beneath. No thought of the accidents of absence or company, or any of the chances of everyday life, had occurred to him before. A carriage stood at the door. He almost stamped with impatience till the door opened and he was admitted. The change to the warm, luxurious gloom of the parlors quieted him a little, but he paced up and down with long strides while he waited. The strong stillness that he had resolutely maintained was broken down now with a feverish restlessness.

She came at length—it seemed to him forever first—with the rustle and shimmer of trailing lengths of silk down the long room. A fleecy mist covered neck and arms, and some miracle of a carriage wrapping lay white and soft about her face. She did not recognize him in the obscurity; his message of 'a friend' had not betrayed him. But his voice, with its new, proud hopefulness, its under vein triumphant and eager, struck her into a blinding, giddy whirl, in which voice and words were lost. It passed in a moment, and he was saying, 'And I am free now—honorably free—and have come where my heart has been, ever since that month on the seaside. Most gracious and sovereign lady,'—he broke into sudden, almost mirthful speech, dropping on one knee with a semblance of humility proved no mockery by the diamond light in the brown eyes and the reverent throb that came straight from his voice.

She bent over him as he knelt, and drew her cool, soft hands across his forehead and down his face, and her even, silvery syllables cut like death:

'Mr. Moore, last night I promised to marry your friend, Captain Morris.'

For the space of a minute stillness like the grave filled the room, and then all the intense strain of heart and nerve gave way, as the bitter tide of disappointment broke in and rolled over his future; and without word or sound he dropped forward at her feet.

She knelt down beside him with a low, bitter cry. It reached his dulled sense; he rose feebly.

'Forgive me; I have not been myself of late, I think; and this—this was so sudden,' and he walked away with dull, nerveless tread.

On the table, near her, lay her handkerchief. It breathed of heliotrope. Her words came back to him: 'Only in coffins, about still, dead faces.' He stopped in his walk and looked down on her. Forever he should remember all that ghostly sheen of silvery white about a rigid face with unutterably sad fixed mouth and drooping lids. He thrust the fleecy handful into his breast.

'I may keep this?' and took permission from her silence.

'Good-by;' the words came through ashy lips, a half sob. She knelt as impassive as marble, as cold and white. He waited a moment for the word or look that did not come, turned away, the hall door fell heavily shut, and he was gone.

Fifteen minutes after, Miss Berkeley was whirling to the house where she was to officiate as bridesmaid, and where she was haughtier, and colder, and ten times more attractive than ever.

Private Moore, waiting for the midnight return train, found life a grim prospect.

Three weeks after, a summons came from the captain's tent. George had just returned from his own furlough, and this was their first meeting. Even while their hands clasped, his new, happy secret told itself.

'Congratulate me, Clement Moore! You remember Lois Berkeley? She has promised to be Lois Berkeley Morris one day!' and, with happy lover's egotism, did not notice the gray shade about his hearer's lips.

Various items of news followed.

'A truce boat goes over to-morrow,' remembering the fact suddenly; 'there will be opportunity to send a few letters; so, if you wish to write to that lady 'beyond the lines'—

The voice that replied was thin and harsh:

'Miss Rose declined alliance with a 'Yankee hireling,' and was married last October.'

Honest George wrung his friend's hand anew, and heaped mental anathemas on his own stupidity for not seeing how haggard and worn the dark face had grown—anathemas which were just enough, perhaps, only he hardly saw the reason in quite the right light. But he spared all allusions to his own prospects thereafter, and finding that Moore rather avoided than sought him, measured and forgave the supposed cause by his own heart.

At length came a time when a new life and impulse roused into action even that slowly moved great body, the officers of the Potomac Army, and that much-abused and sorely tried insignificant item, the army itself. On every camp ground reigned the confusion of a flitting. All the roads were filled with regiments hurrying southward, faces growing more and more hazard with fatigue and privation, weak and slender forms falling from the ranks, cowards and traitors skulking to the rear, till at length on the banks of the river stood an army, hungry, footsore, marchworn, but plucky, and ready for any service that might be required of them, even if that service were but to 'march up the hill and then march down again'—what was left of them.

An atom in the moving mass of blue, Clement Moore shared the pontoon crossing, was silent through the storms of cheers that greeted each regiment as they splashed over and up the bank, and, drawn up in line of battle at last, surveyed the field without a pulsation of emotion. Other men about him chafed at the restraint; he stood motionless, with eyes a thousand miles away. And when the advance sounded, and the line started with a cheer, no sound passed his lips. A half-unconscious prayer went up that he might fall there, and have it over with this life battle, that had gone so sorely against him. He moved as in a dream. The whirl and roar of battle swept around and by him; he charged with the fiercest, saw the blue lines reel and break only to close up and charge again, took his life in his hand a dozen times, and stood at length with the few who held that first line of rifle pits, gazing in each other's faces in the momentary lull, and wondering at their own existence. Then came a shock, shivers of red-hot pain ran through every nerve, and then—blissful, cool unconsciousness. Captain George, galloping by, with the red glare of battle on his face, saw the fall, and halted. A half dozen ready hands swung the body to his saddle. For a little the tide of battle eddied away, and in the comparative quiet, George tore down the hill to a spring bubbling out under the cedars.

The darkness that wrapped the wounded man dissolved gradually. The thunder and crash of guns, the mad cheers, the confusion of the bands withdrew farther and farther, and drifted away from his failing senses. He was back in his Southern home; the arm under his head was his mother's; and he murmured some boyish request. Jasmine and clematis oppressed him with their oversweetness; overhead the shining leaves of the magnolia swung with slow grace. So long since he had seen a magnolia, not since that evening—a life time ago, it seemed; the sight and fragrance fell on him as her cool touch did that last time. The heart throbs choked him then; he was choking again. 'Water, mother—a drink!' and something wet his lips and trickled down his throat, not cool and sweet as the rippling water he longed for, and he turned away with sickly fretfulness; but a new strength thrilled through his limbs. He opened his eyes; a face, battle-stained, but tear-wet like a woman's, bent over him.

'O Clement, dear old fellow, do you know me?'

He smiled faintly, with stiffening lips. 'Yes, I know. I've prayed for it, George. I couldn't live to see her your wife. Good-by, dear boy. Tell mother—' He wandered again. 'Kiss me, mother—now Lois, my Marguerite. Into thy hands, O Lord—' A momentary struggle for breath, and then Morris laid back the grand head, and knelt, looking down on the beautiful face, over which the patient strength of perfect calm had settled forever.

'So that was it, after all,' he said, bitterly. 'Fool not to see; and he was worth a generation of such as I.'

He turned away, tightened his saddle girths, cast a look on the pandemonium before him, looked back with one foot already in the stirrup.

'I sha'n't see him again in this hell, even if I come out of it myself.' And going back, with gentle fingers he removed the few trinkets on the body. In an inner pocket of the blouse he found a small packet. He opened it on the spot. A lady's handkerchief, silky fine, white as ever. No need of the delicate tracery in the corners to tell him whose. The perfume that haunted it still called back too vividly that evening when he had wondered at and loved her more for the strange, perfect calm that chilled a little his outburst of happiness. He folded it back carefully, touched his lips as a woman might have done to the cold forehead, and mounted, plunging up the hill to the fight that had recommenced over the trench. Later in the day, the ball that fate moulded for Captain George found him. He gave one low, pitiful cry as it crashed through his bridle arm, and then a merciful darkness closed about him.

Two months after, white and thin, with one empty sleeve fastened across his chest, he stood where another had stood waiting for the same woman. Through the window drifted in the early spring fragrance; a handful of early spring flowers lay on the table. A soft rustle and slow step through the hall, and he rose as Lois came in. She glanced at the empty sleeve with grave, wide eyes, and sat down near him. He would not have known the face before him, it had so altered; the hair pushed back from hollow, blue-veined temples, the sharpened, angular outlines, and an old, suffering look about the mouth and sunken eyes.

Few words were spoken—nothing beyond the most commonplace greetings. Then she said:

'I should have come to you, but I have been ill myself; near death, I believe,' she added, wearily.

She gave the explanation with no throb of feeling. She would have apologized for a careless dress with more spirit once.

He rose and laid a packet before her.

'A lady's handkerchief—yours, I think. I was with him when he died, though his body was not found afterward. I was hurt myself, you know, and could not attend to it,' he said, deprecatingly.

She did not touch it, looking from it up to him with eyes filled with just such a grieved, questioning look as might come into the eyes of some animal dying in torture. He could not endure it. He put out his white, wasted left hand.

'My poor child!' She shivered, caught her breath with a sob, and, burying her face in the pillows of a couch, gave way to her first tears in an agony of weeping. And he sat apart, not daring to touch her, nor to speak—wishing, with unavailing bitterness, that it had been he who was left lying stark and still beneath the cedars.

The storm passed. She lay quiet now, all but the sobs that shook her whole slight frame. He said, at last, very gently:

'If I had known—you should have told me. He was my best friend.' His voice trembled a little. 'I know how I must seem to you. His murderer, perhaps; surely the murderer of your happiness.' A deeper quaver in the sorrowful tones. 'It is too late now, I know; but if it would help you ever so little to be released from your promise—'

There was no reply.

'You are free. I am going now.' He bent over her for a breath, making a heart picture of the tired face, the closed eyes, and grieved mouth. Only to take her up for a moment, with power to comfort her—he would have given his life for that—and turned away with a great, yearning pain snatching at his breath. In the hall he paused a moment, trying to think. A light step, a frail hand on his arm, a wistful face lifted to his.

'Forgive me; I have been very unkind. You are so good and noble. I will be your wife, if you will be any happier.'

He looked down at her pityingly. 'You are very tired. Shall you say that when you are rested again? Remember, you are free.'

'If not yours, then never any one's.'

His arm fell about her, his lips touched her forehead quietly; he led her back to her couch, and arranged her pillow, smiling a little at his one awkward hand.

'I shall not see you again before I go back, unless you send for me.'

She put out her hand and touched the bowed face quickly and lightly; and with that touch thrilling in his veins he went away.

Through Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Charleston siege, Captain George, no longer captain, now twice promoted for cool bravery, has borne a charmed life—a grave, calm man, remembering always a still face, 'pathetic with dying.'

Out from the future is turned toward him another face, no less pathetic in its unrest of living. The soldiers in the Capital hospitals, dragging through the weary weeks of convalescence, know that face well. For hours of every day she goes about busied with such voluntary service as she is permitted to do. She sees tired faces brighten at her coming—is welcomed by rough and gentle voices. Always patient, ready, thoughtful, she is 'spending' herself—waiting for the end.