head
up against the dead leaves that have sheltered it. The two riders had
something of the same sensation, as though the leafless woods and
the laurel thickets, the warm, moist air and the low clouds, were a
protection and a soft shelter. Somewhat to Carrington's surprise, he
found that it was pleasant to have Sybil's company. He felt towards her
as to a sister--a favourite sister.

She at once attacked him for abandoning her and breaking his treaty so
lately made, and he tried to gain her sympathy by saying that if she
knew how much he was troubled, she would forgive him. Then when Sybil
asked whether he really must go and leave her without any friend whom
she could speak to, his feelings got the better of him: he could not
resist the temptation to confide all his troubles in her, since there
was no one else in whom he could confide. He told her plainly that he
was in love with her sister.

"You say that love is nonsense, Miss Ross. I tell you it is no such
thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about
the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's
nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant,
but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength. It is a disease to
be borne with patience, like any other nervous complaint, and to be
treated with counter-irritants. My trip to Mexico will be good for it,
but that is not the reason why I must go."

Then he told her all his private circumstances; the ruin which the war
had brought on him and his family; how, of his two brothers, one
had survived the war only to die at home, a mere wreck of disease,
privation, and wounds; the other had been shot by his side, and bled
slowly to death in his arms during the awful carnage in the Wilderness;
how his mother and two sisters were struggling for a bare subsistence
on a wretched Virginian farm, and how all his exertions barely kept them
from beggary.

"You have no conception of the poverty to which our southern women
are reduced since the war," said he; "they are many of them literally
without clothes or bread." The fee he should earn by going to Mexico
would double his income this year. Could he refuse? Had he a right to
refuse? And poor Carrington added, with a groan, that if he alone were
in question, he would sooner be shot than go.

Sybil listened with tears in her eyes. She never before had seen a man
show suffering. The misery she had known in