of the arch-slayer.

Jane Mattock assisting Mrs. Adister O'Donnell to restore Captain Philip
was very singularly affected, like a person shut off on a sudden from her
former theories and feelings. Theoretically she despised the soldier's
work as much as she shrank abhorrently from bloodshed. She regarded him
and his trappings as an ensign of our old barbarism, and could peruse
platitudes upon that theme with enthusiasm. The soldier personally, she
was accustomed to consider an inferior intelligence: a sort of schoolboy
when young, and schoolmaster when mature a visibly limited creature, not
a member of our broader world. Without dismissing any of these views she
found them put aside for the reception of others of an opposite
character; and in her soul she would have ascribed it to her cares of
nursing that she had become thoughtful, doubtful, hopeful, even
prayerful, surcharged with zeal, to help to save a good sword for the
country. If in a world still barbarous we must have soldiers, here was
one whom it would be grievous to lose. He had fallen for the country; and
there was a moving story of how he had fallen. She inclined to think more
highly of him for having courted exposure on a miserable frontier war
where but a poor sheaf of glory could be gathered. And he seemed to
estimate his professional duties apart from an aim at the laurels. A
conception of the possibility of a man's being both a soldier and morally
a hero edged its way into her understanding. It stood edgeways within,
desirous of avoiding a challenge to show every feature.

The cares of nursing were Jane's almost undividedly, except for the aid
she had from her friend Grace Barrow and from Miss Colesworth. Mrs.
Adister O'Donnell was a nurse in name only. 'She'll be seen by Philip
like as if she were a nightmare apparition of his undertaker's wraith,'
Captain Con said to Jane, when recommending his cousin to her charitable
nature, after he had taken lodgings at a farmhouse near Mrs. Lackstraw's
model farm Woodside on the hills. 'Barring the dress,' as he added, some
such impression of her frigid mournfulness might have struck a recumbent
invalid. Jane acknowledged it, and at first induced her aunt to join her
in the daily walk of half a mile to sit with him. Mrs. Lackstraw was a
very busy lady at her farm; she was often summoned to London by her
intuition of John's wish to have her presiding at table for the
entertainment of his numerous guests; she conf