ay that there is yellow fever among
the Yankee troops in Louisiana. It would be like them to bring
that horror into the Ca'linas and Virginia----"

He turned his head suddenly, partly rose from where he lay; and she
caught her breath and bent swiftly over him, placing one hand on
his arm and gently forcing him down upon the-pillow again.

"Fo'give me, dear," she faltered. "I forgot what I was reading----"

He said, thoughtfully: "Did you ever hear exactly how my mother
died, Celia? . . . But I know you never did. . . . And I think I
had better tell you."

"She died in the fever camp at Silver Bayou, when you were a little
lad," whispered Celia.

"No."

"Philip! What are you saying?"

"You don't know how my mother died," he said quietly.

"Phil, we had the papers--and the Governor of Louisiana wrote us
himse'f----"

"I know what he wrote and what the papers published was not true.
I'll tell you how she died. When I was old enough to take care of
myself I went to Silver Bayou. . . . Many people in that town had
died; some still survived. I found the parish records. I found
one of the camp doctors who remembered that accursed year of
plague--an old man, withered, indifferent, sleeping his days away
on the rotting gallery of his tumble-down house. _He_ knew. . . .
And I found some of the militia still surviving; and one among them
retained a confused memory of my mother--among the horrors of that
poisonous year----"

He lay silent, considering; then: "I was old enough to remember,
but not old enough to understand what I understood later. . . . Do
you want to know how my mother died?"

Celia's lips moved in amazed assent.

"Then I will tell you. . . . They had guards north, east, and west
of us. They had gone mad with fright; the whole land was
quarantined against us; musket, flintlock, shotgun, faced us
through the smoke of their burning turpentine. I was only a little
lad, but the horror of it I have never forgotten, nor my mother's
terror--not for herself, for me."

He lay on his side, thin hands clasped, looking not at Celia but
beyond her at the dreadful scene his fancy was painting on the wall
of his mother's room:

"Often, at night, we heard the shots along the dead line. Once
they murdered a man behind our water garden. Our negroes moaned
and sobbed all day, all night, helpless, utterly demoralised. Two
were shot swimming; one came back dying from snake bite. I saw him
dead on t