ould have shaken the very dust of the
threshold when she was beyond its doors,--but not now. Now, as she
beheld it, she sat still to survey it, with surprise that deepened into
indignation and compassion, that many a time filled her eyes with tears,
and brought an added expression of respect to her voice when she spoke
to these people who seemed to have all the good things that this world
can offer, upon whom fortune had expended her treasures, yet--

Whatever it was, Sallie came from that home with many an old senseless
prejudice destroyed forever, with a new thought implanted in her soul,
the blossoming of which was a noxious vapor in the nostrils of some who
were compelled to inhale it, but as a sweet-smelling savor to more than
one weary wayfarer, and to that God to whom the darkness and the light
are alike, and who, we are told by His own word, is no respecter of
persons.

"Poor, dear Miss Ercildoune!" half sobbed, half scolded Sallie, as she
sat at her work, blooming and, fresh, the day after her return. "What a
tangled thread it is, to be sure," jerking at her knotty needleful.
"Well, I know what I'll do,--I'll treat her as if she was a queen born
and crowned, just so long as I have anything to do with her,--so I
will." And she did.

CHAPTER VIII

"_For hearts of truest mettle
Absence doth join, and time doth settle._"

Anonymous

It were a vain endeavor to attempt the telling of what filled the heart
and soul of Surrey, as he marched away that day from New York, and
through the days and weeks and months that followed. Fired by a sublime
enthusiasm for his country; thirsting to drink of any cup her hand might
present, that thus he might display his absolute devotion to her cause;
burning with indignation at the wrongs she had suffered; thrilled with
an adoring love for the idea she embodied; eager to make manifest this
love at whatever cost of pain and sorrow and suffering to
himself,--through all this the man never once was steeped in
forgetfulness in the soldier; the divine passion of patriotism never
once dulled the ache, or satisfied the desire, or answered the prayer,
or filled the longing heart, that through the day marches and the night
watches cried, and would not be appeased, for his darling.

"Surely," he thought as he went down Broadway, as he reflected, as he
considered the matter a thousand times thereafter,--"surely I was a fool
not to have spoken to her then; not to have seen