now-you-_have_-done-it
glance and looked down. "Well, I know," she measuredly said, "that a man
who can _tell_ a woman that, isn't capable of loving her half enough."
She turned to go back, with a quickness which, I avow, was beautifully
and tenderly different from irritation, yet which caused her petticoat's
frail embroidery to catch on one of his spurs and cling till the whole
laughing bevy had gathered round to jest over Flora's disentanglement of
it.

* * * * *

"But really, Nan, you know," said Constance that evening in their home,
"you used to believe that yourself! The day Steve left you said almost
exact--"

"Con--? Ah, Con! I think the _sister_ who could remind a _sister_ of
that--!" The sufferer went slowly up to her room, where half an hour
later she was found by Miranda drying her bathed eyes at a mirror and
instantly pretending that her care was for any other part of her face
instead.

"Singular," she remarked, "what a dust that battery can raise!"

XXV

"HE MUST WAIT," SAYS ANNA

About the middle of the first week in April--when the men left in the
stores of Common, Gravier, Poydras, or Tchoupitoulas street could do
nothing but buy the same goods back and forth in speculation; loathed by
all who did not do it, or whittle their chairs on the shedded sidewalks
and swap and swallow flaming rumors and imprecate the universal inaction
and mis-management--there embarked for Pensacola--

"What? Kincaid's Bat--?"

"No-o, the Zouaves! Infantry! when the one only sane thing to do," cried
every cannoneer of Camp Callender--in its white lanes or on three-hours'
leave at home on Bayou Road or Coliseum Square or Elysian Fields or
Prytania street--"the one sane thing to do," insisted the growingly
profane lads to their elders, and assented the secretly pained elders to
them, "the one thing that, if only for shame's sake, ought to have been
done long ago, was to _knock_ Fort Pickens to HELL with SHELL!" Sadly
often they added the tritest three-monosyllabled expletive known to
red-hot English.

Charlie--mm-mm! how he could rip it out! Sam Gibbs, our veritable Sam,
sergeant of the boy's gun, "Roaring Betsy," privately remarked to the
Captain what a blank-blank shame it was, not for its trivial self, of
course, but in view of the corruptions to which it opened the way. And
the blithe commander, in the seclusion of his tent, standing over the
lad and holding him tenderly b