y out of her heart. She threw the feeling off with an
effort.

"What has it all to do with my love!" she cried with a toss of her
pretty head as she sprang into the saddle for the gallop to Alexandria.

The cool, bracing air of this first day of September, 1862, was like
wine. The dew was yet heavy on the tall grass by the roadside and a song
was singing in her heart that made all other music dumb.

John had dismounted and was standing beside the road, the horse's bridle
hanging on his arm in the very position he had stood and looked into her
soul that day.

She leaped to the ground without waiting for his help and sprang into
his arms.

"I like you better with that bronzed look--you're handsomer than ever,"
she sighed at last.

His answer was another kiss, to which he added:

"No amount of sunburn could make you any prettier, dear--you've been
perfect from the first."

"Your General is here?" Betty asked.

"Yes."

"And you can give me the whole day?"

"Every hour--the General is my friend."

The moment was too sweet to allow any shadow to cloud it. The girl
yielded to its spell without reserve. They mounted and rode side by side
over the hills. And the man poured into her ears the unspoken things he
had felt and longed to say in the lonely nights of camp and field. The
girl confessed the pain and the longing of her waiting.

They mounted the crest of a hill and the breeze from the southwest
brought the sullen boom of a cannon.

Instinctively they drew rein.

"The battle has begun again," John said casually.

"It stirs your blood, doesn't it?" she whispered.

A frown darkened his brow:

"Not to-day."

The girl looked with quick surprise.

"You don't mean it?"

"Certainly. Why get excited when you know the end before it begins."

"You know it?"

"Yes."

"Victory?"

He laughed cynically:

"Victory for a pompous braggart who could write that address to an army
reflecting on the men who fought Lee and Jackson before Richmond with
such desperate courage?"

"You are sure of defeat then?"

"Absolutely."

Betty looked at him with a flush of angry excitement:

"General McClellan is counting on Pope's defeat to-day?"

"Yes."

"Then it's true that he is not really trying to help him?"

"Why should he wish to sacrifice his brave men under the leadership of a
fool?"

"He is, in fact, defying the orders of the President, isn't he?"

"You might say that if you strain a point," John adm