t always. Even now, in the
driving, whirling storm without, in the darkness of her chamber, or
when she looked through the frosted panes into the starry skies at
midnight, always it was there all about her,--a something unexpressed,
unseen, but close--close to her,--the mystery which throbbed through
all her small being, and which she was one day to find out and
understand and put into her great epic.

She thought over her father's question, hardly knowing why she liked
that last stanza best. She slowly wound up her ball of yarn and thrust
the needles through it, and dropped it into her mother's workbasket
before she replied; then, taking up her candle, she looked shyly in
her father's eyes.

"Because I like where it says: 'This pleasure more sharp than pain,
That baffles and lures me so.'" Then she was gone, hurrying away lest
they should question her further and learn about the little book in
her pocket.

Thus time passed with the Ballards, many days swiftly flying, laden
with a fair share of sweetness and pleasure, and much of harassment
and toil, but in the main bringing happiness.

CHAPTER VI

THE END OF THE WAR

It was three years after the troops marched away from High Knob
encampment before either Peter Junior or Richard Kildene were again in
Leauvite, and then only Peter returned, because he was wounded, and
not that he was unwilling to enlist again, as did Richard and many of
the boys, when their first term of service was ended. He returned with
the brevet of a captain, for gallant conduct in the encounter in which
he received his wound, but only a shadow of the healthy, earnest boy
who had stood in the ranks on the town square of Leauvite three years
before; yet this very fact brought life and hope to his waiting
mother, now that she had the blessed privilege of nursing him back to
strength.

It seemed as though her long period of mourning ended when Peter
Junior, pallid in his blue uniform, his hair darkened and matted with
the dampness caused by weakness and pain, was borne in between the
white columns of his father's house. When the news reached him that
his son was lying wounded in a southern hospital, the Elder had, for
the first time in many, many years, followed an impulse without
pausing to consider his act beforehand. He left the bank on the
instant and started for the scene of battles, only hurrying home to
break the news first to his wife. Yielding to a rare tenderness, he
touche