Where are they?"

"One fell with Jackson at Chancellorsville. It was a glorious death,
but he is not dead to me. I shall always see him, as he was when he went
away, a tall, strong man with brown hair and blue eyes. Another fell in
Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. They told me that his body lay across
one of the Union guns on Cemetery Hill. That, too, was a glorious death,
and like his brother he shall live for me as long as I live. The third
is alive and with Lee."

She had stopped knitting, but now she resumed it, and, during another
embarrassed pause, the click, click of the needles was the only sound
heard in the room.

"I regret it, madame," resumed Dick, "but we must search the house
thoroughly."

"Proceed," she said again in that tone of finality.

"Take the men and look carefully through every room," said Dick to the
sergeant. "I will remain here."

Whitley and the troopers withdrew quietly. When the last of them had
disappeared he walked to one of the windows and looked out. He saw his
mounted men beyond the rose garden on guard, and he knew that they were
as vigilant on the other sides of the house. The sharpshooter could
not escape, and he was firmly resolved not to go without him. Yet his
conscience hurt him. It was hard, too, to wait there, while the woman
said not a word, but knitted on as placidly as if he did not exist.

"Madame," he said at last, "I pray that you do not regard this as an
intrusion. The uses of war are hard. We must search. No one can regret
it more than I do, in particular since I am really a Southerner myself,
a Kentuckian."

"A traitor then as well as an enemy."

Dick flushed deeply, and again there was angry blood in his veins,
but he restrained his temper.

"You must at least allow to a man the liberty of choice," he said.

"Provided he has the intelligence and honesty to choose right."

Dick flushed again and bit his lip. And yet he felt that a woman who had
lost two sons before Northern bullets might well be unforgiving. There
was nothing more for him to say, and while he turned back to the window
the knitting needles resumed their click, click.

He waited a full ten minutes and he knew that the sergeant and his men
were searching the house thoroughly. Nothing could escape the notice of
Whitley, and he would surely find the sharpshooter. Then he heard their
footsteps on a stairway and in another minute they entered the great
room. The face of the