I love you a thousand times better than my country, Liz.--Wicked?
So much the worse. It's the truth. But if I find your memory makes a
milksop of me, I shall thrust you out of the way, without ceremony,--I
shall clap you into my box or between the leaves of my Bible, and only
look at you on Sunday."

"I shall be very glad, Sir, if that makes you open your Bible
frequently," says Elizabeth, rather demurely.

"I shall put one of your photographs against every page," cried Ford;
"and then I think I shall not lack a text for my meditations. Don't you
know how Catholics keep little pictures of their adored Lady in their
prayer-books?"

"Yes, indeed," said Lizzie; "I should think it would be a very
soul-stirring picture, when you are marching to the front, the night
before a battle,--a poor, stupid girl, knitting stupid socks, in a
stupid Yankee village."

Oh, the craft of artless tongues! Jack strode along in silence a few
moments, splashing straight through a puddle; then, ere he was quite
clear of it, he stretched out his arm and gave his companion a long
embrace.

"And pray what am I to do," resumed Lizzie, wondering, rather proudly
perhaps, at Jack's averted face, "while you are marching and
countermarching in Virginia?"

"Your duty, of course," said Jack, in a steady voice, which belied a
certain little conjecture of Lizzie's. "I think you will find the sun
will rise in the east, my dear, just as it did before you were engaged."

"I'm sure I didn't suppose it wouldn't," says Lizzie.

"By duty I don't mean anything disagreeable, Liz," pursued the young
man. "I hope you'll take your pleasure, too. I wish you might go to
Boston, or even to Leatherborough, for a month or two."

"What for, pray?"

"What for? Why, for the fun of it: to 'go out,' as they say."

"Jack, do you think me capable of going to parties while you are in
danger?"

"Why not? Why should I have all the fun?"

"Fun? I'm sure you're welcome to it all. As for me, I mean to make a new
beginning."

"Of what?"

"Oh, of everything. In the first place, I shall begin to improve my
mind. But don't you think it's horrid for women to be reasonable?"

"Hard, say you?"

"Horrid,--yes, and hard too. But I mean to become so. Oh, girls are such
fools, Jack! I mean to learn to like boiled mutton and history and plain
sewing, and all that. Yet, when a girl's engaged, she's not expected to
do anything in particular."

Jack laughed, and said nothing; a