your lips to
say. You are only a tired, frightened boy--scarcely eighteen, are you?
And at eighteen no heart can really be a traitor."

"Traitor!" he repeated, losing all his angry color.

"It is a bad word, isn't it, Roy? Lying hidden and starving in the
forest through the black nights you had to fight that word away from
you--drive it out of your half-crazed senses--often--didn't you? Don't
you think I know, my boy, what a dreadful future you faced, lying there
through the stifling nights while they hunted you to hang you?

"I know, also, that what you did you did in a moment of insane rage. I
know that the moment it was done you would, in your secret soul, have
given the world to have undone it."

"No!" he cried. "I was right!"

She rose, walked to the door, and seated herself on the sill, looking up
at the stars.

For an hour she sat there, silent. Behind her, leaning heavily on the
table, he crouched, hot eyes wide, pulse heavy in throat and body. And
at last, without turning, she called to him--three times, very gently,
speaking his name; and at the third call he rose and came stumbling
toward her.

"Sit here."

He sank down beside her on the sill.

"Are you very tired?"

"Yes."

She placed one arm around him, drawing his hot head down on her
shoulder.

"How foolish you have been," she whispered. "But, of course, your mother
must not know it.... There is no reason to tell her--ever.... Because
you went quite mad for a little while--and nobody is blamed for mental
sickness.... How bright the stars are.... What a heavenly coolness after
that dreadful work.... How feverish you are! I think that your regiment
believes you roamed away while suffering from sunstroke.... Their
Colonel is a good friend of mine. Tell him you're sorry."

His head lay heavily on her shoulder; she laid a fresh hand over his
eyes.

"If the South is right, if we of the North are right, God knows better
than you or I, Roy.... And if you are so bewildered that you have no
deep conviction either way I think you may trust Him who set you among
Kay's Cavalry.... God never betrayed a human soul in honest doubt."

"It--it was the flag!--that was the hardest to get over--" he began, and
choked, smothering the dry sob against her breast.

"I know, dear.... The old flag means so much--it means all that our
fathers have been, all that we ought to be for the world's sake. Anger,
private resentment, bitterness under tyranny--these are