exclaimed:--

"Why, Laura!"--for it was that one of his two gay young nieces who stood
in the door-way. The banker's wife followed in just behind, and was
presently saying, with the prettiest heartiness, that Dr. Sevier looked
no older than the day they met the Florida general at dinner years
before. She had just come in from the Confederacy, smuggling her son of
eighteen back to the city, to save him from the conscript officers, and
Laura had come with her. And when the clergyman got his crutches into
his armpits and stood on one foot, and he and Laura both blushed as they
shook hands, the Doctor knew that she had come to nurse her wounded
lover. That she might do this without embarrassment, they got married,
and were thereupon as vexed with themselves as they could be under the
circumstances that they had not done it four or five years before. Of
course there was no parade; but Dr. Sevier gave a neat little dinner.
Mary and Laura were its designers; Madame Zenobie was the master-builder
and made the gumbo. One word about the war, whose smoke was over all the
land, would have spoiled the broth. But no such word was spoken.

It happened that the company was almost the same as that which had sat
down in brighter days to that other dinner, which the banker's wife
recalled with so much pleasure. She and her husband and son were guests;
also that Sister Jane, of whom they had talked, a woman of real goodness
and rather unrelieved sweetness; also her sister and bankrupted
brother-in-law. The brother-in-law mentioned several persons who, he
said, once used to be very cordial to him and his wife, but now did not
remember them; and his wife chid him, with the air of a fellow-martyr;
but they could not spoil the tender gladness of the occasion.

"Well, Doctor," said the banker's wife, looking quite the old lady now,
"I suppose your lonely days are over, now that Laura and her husband are
to keep house for you."

"Yes," said the Doctor.

But the very thought of it made him more lonely than ever.

"It's a very pleasant and sensible arrangement," said the lady, looking
very practical and confidential; "Laura has told me all about it. It's
just the thing for them and for you."

"I think so, ma'am," replied Dr. Sevier, and tried to make his statement
good.

"I'm sure of it," said the lady, very sweetly and gayly, and made a
faint time-to-go beckon with a fan to her husband, to whom, in the
farther drawing-room, Laura and Ma