e Elder asked me to dinner and I jumped at the
chance."

"This is your home always, you know."

"And it's good to think of, too, Aunt Hester."

She looked at her son and then her nephew. "You are so like in your
uniforms I would not know you apart on the street in the dark," she
said. Richard shot a merry glance in his uncle's eyes, then only
smiled decorously with him and Peter Junior.

"I wish you'd visit the camp and see us drill. We go like clockwork,
Peter and I. They call us the twins."

"There is a very good reason for that, for your mother and I were
twins, and you resemble her, while Peter Junior resembles me," said
the Elder.

"Yes," said Hester, "Peter Junior looks like his father;" but as she
glanced at her son she knew his soul was hers.

Thus the meal passed in quiet, decorous talk, touching on nothing
vital, but holding a smoldering fire underneath. The young men said
nothing about the fact that the regiment had been called to duty, and
soon the camp on the bluff would be breaking up. They dared not touch
on the past, and they as little dared touch on the future--indeed
there might be no future. So they talked of indifferent things, and
Hester parted with her nephew as if they were to meet again soon,
except that she called him back when he was halfway down the steps and
kissed him again. As for her son, she took him up to his room and
there they stayed for an hour, and then he came out and she was left
in the house alone.

CHAPTER IV

LEAVE-TAKING

Early in the morning, while the earth was still a mass of gray shadow
and mist, and the sky had only begun to show faint signs of the flush
of dawn, Betty, awake and alert, crept softly out of bed, not to
awaken Martha, who slept the sleep of utter weariness at her side.
Martha had returned only the day before from her visit to her
grandfather's, a long carriage ride away from Leauvite.

Betty bathed hurriedly, giving a perfunctory brushing to the tangled
mass of curls, and getting into her clothing swiftly and silently. She
had been cautioned the night before by her mother not to awaken her
sister by getting up at too early an hour, for she would be called in
plenty of time to drive over with the rest to see the soldiers off.
But what if her mother should forget! So she put on her new white
dress and gathered a few small parcels which she had carefully tied up
the night before, and her hat and little white linen cape, and taking
her sh