ry useful. But I am going to try."

"I thought"--it was not quite easy to speak, for I was struggling with
something which threatened to roughen my voice--"I thought you did not
graduate till June?"

"Not regularly; not usually; but things are extraordinary this year.
We graduate and go on to Washington at once."

I believe we were all silent a few minutes.

"Daisy," said Miss Cardigan, "you have nobody that is dear to _you_
likely to be engaged in the fray--if there is one?"

"I don't know--" I said, rather faintly. I remember I said it; I
cannot tell why, for I _did_ know. I knew that Preston and Ransom were
both likely to be in the struggle, even if Ransom had been at the
moment at the opposite side of the world. But then Thorold roused up
and began to talk. He talked to divert us, I think. He told us of
things that concerned himself and his class personally, giving details
to which we listened eagerly; and he went on from them to things and
people in the public line, of which and of whom neither Miss Cardigan
nor I had known the thousandth part so much before. We sat and
listened, Miss Cardigan often putting in a question, while the warm
still glow of the firelight shed over us and all the room its
assurance of peace and quiet, woven and compounded of life-long
associations. Thorold sat before us and talked, and we looked at him
and listened in the fire-shine; and my thoughts made swift sideway
flights every now and then from this peace and glow of comfort, and
from Thorold's talk, to the changes of the camp and the possible
coming strife; spectres of war, guns and swords, exposure and
wounds--and sickness--and the battlefield--what could I tell? and Miss
Cardigan's servant put another lump of coal on the fire, and Thorold
presently broke it, and the jet of illumination sprang forth, mocking
and yet revealing in its sweet home glow my visions of terror. They
were but momentary visions; I could not bear, of course, to look
steadily at them; they were spectres that came and went with a wave of
a hand, in a jet of flame, or the shadow of an opening door; but they
went and came; and I saw many things in Thorold's face that night
besides the manly lines of determination and spirit, the look of
thought and power, and the hover of light in his eye when it turned to
me. I don't know what Miss Cardigan saw; but several times in the
evening I heard her sigh; a thing very unusual and notable with her.
Again and again I h