s, and, with the exception of the few field hands
who had followed the Union army, they still lived in their little cabins
and drew their daily rations from the storehouse. Betty herself shared
their rations of cornmeal and bacon, jealously guarding her small supplies
of milk and eggs for Mrs. Ambler and the two old ladies. "It makes no
difference what I eat," she would assure protesting Mammy Riah. "I am so
strong, you see, and besides I really like Aunt Floretta's ashcakes."

Spring and summer passed, with the ripened vegetables which Hosea had
planted in the garden, and the long winter brought with it the old daily
struggle to make the slim barrels of meal last until the next harvesting.
It was in this year that the four women at Uplands followed the Major's
lead and invested their united fortune in Confederate bonds. "We will rise
or fall with the government," Mrs. Ambler had said with her gentle
authority. "Since we have given it our best, let it take all freely."

"Surely money is of no matter," Betty had answered, lavishly disregardful
of worldly goods. "Do you think we might give our jewels, too? I have
grandma's pearls hidden beneath the floor, you know."

"If need be--let us wait, dear," replied her mother, who, grave and pallid
as a ghost, would eat nothing that, by any chance, could be made to reach
the army.

"I do not want it, my child, there are so many hungrier than I," she would
say when Betty brought her dainty little trays from the pantry.

"But I am hungry for you, mamma--take it for my sake," the girl would beg,
on the point of tears. "You are starving, that is it--and yet it does not
feed the army."

In these days it seemed to her that all the anguish of her life had centred
in the single fear of losing her mother. At times she almost reproached
herself with loving Dan too much, and for months she would resolutely keep
her thoughts from following him, while she laid her impassioned service at
her mother's feet. Day or night there was hardly a moment when she was not
beside her, trying, by very force of love, to hold her back from the death
to which she went with her slow and stately tread.

For Mrs. Ambler, who had kept her strength for a year after the Governor's
death, seemed at last to be gently withdrawing from a place in which she
found herself a stranger. There was nothing to detain her now; she was too
heartsick to adapt herself to many changes; loss and approaching poverty
might be bo