she said she could not bear to have me
go where I was going without feeling that I had left a most affectionate
friend, who would watch eagerly for my success, and sympathize with all
my trials. Auntie! who knows?"

I saw by the lighting up of his dark eyes what hope lay at the very
bottom of his soul. And, to be sure, who knew what might be in the
future? At all events, it made him more comfortable now to have this
little, unexpressed, crouching hope, where he could silently caress it
when he was far away from us all. He had all our photographs,--mother,
sister, and aunt.

"And now I must go to Mr. Ford's to-night, and bid them good by. Don't
let any enterprising young lawyer come here and get away all my business
before the month is out. I came within an ace of making a writ only last
week!"

So with smiles he parted from me, and strength was given me to smile
too, the next morning, when he marched by my window, and bowed to me, at
the head of his hundred men. I saw his steady, heroic face, no longer
pale, but full of stern purpose and strength. And so they all
looked,--strong, able, determined. The call took all our young men from
Barton. Not one would remain behind.

And that is why I could not love Percy Lunt. How hard she worked at our
soldiers' club! how gentle and respectful she always was to me! If I had
not been always preoccupied and prejudiced, I might have pitied the
poor, overcharged heart, that showed itself so plainly in the deathly
pallor of the young cheek, and the eyes so weighed down with weeping.
Colonel Lunt and his wife watched her with loving eyes, but they could
do little to soothe her. Every heart must taste its own bitterness. And,
besides, she wasn't their own child.

CHAPTER II.

Every village has its great man and woman, and Colonel Lunt and his wife
were Barton's. Theirs was the only family whose table appointments were
of sufficient elegance to board the preceptor of the academy. All the
Lyceum lecturers stopped at Colonel Lunt's; and Mrs. Lunt was the person
who answered the requirements of Lady Manager for the Mount Vernon
Association, namely, "social position, executive ability, tact, and
persistency."

They were the only family in Barton who had been abroad. The rest of us
stayed at home and admired them. They had not always lived in Barton;
perhaps, if they had, we should not have succumbed so entirely as we all
did, ten years ago, when Colonel Lunt came and bought the Sc