ey!" added the younger, evidently desiring to go no faster than
the occasion might require of him.

"I am glad to see you back again," continued the major, without offering
to take his hand. "You deserted like a coward, and I have been ashamed
of you ever since. A young fellow like you, eighteen years old, who will
not fight for his country, ought to lose the respect of even his own
brother."

"That is a pleasant greeting," replied Percy, with the suspicion of a
sneer on his face.

"It is all that a coward deserves," replied Lindley severely.

"I am no coward, any more than you are," protested Percy. "You know that
father did not wish me to join the army, though I wished to do so."

"I know that you wished to do so just as any other coward does,--over
the left."

"What could I do when father told me not to go to the war?"

"What could you do? You could have gone! If you had not been a poltroon,
you would have joined the first regiment that came in your way."

"I never was in the habit of disobeying my father," pleaded the young
agent.

"You were not? You ran away to New Orleans last winter when your father
told you not to go. You came home from the academy when he told you to
remain there. You have spent the evening in Mobile when he told you not
to go there. I could tell you instances all day in which you disobeyed
him, and mother too," continued the soldier warmly.

"That was different."

"It was different; and you could obey your father in a bad cause, but
not in a good one. I am heartily ashamed of you, and I don't feel
willing to own you as a brother of mine."

"But my father told me that I could better serve the good cause by going
with him than I could by joining the army."

"And you were willing to go with him, for then you could keep out of
danger. Father is getting old, and he is not fit to serve in the army;
and you have been his pet since you were born. But that is no excuse for
you; and if I can get you back into the army, I mean to do so."

Percy was afraid he might succeed, and he did not feel as confident as
he had been; and he lost, for the time, some of his self-possession. He
was confronting the fate he had dreaded when he found the steamer was
leaving Nassau.

"What are you doing here?" demanded the major, looking down upon the
deck of the vessel for the first time.

"I am taking this steamer into the bay, where she is to go into the
service of the Confederate States," answered Pe