The tallish girl always looked her best beside some manly form of
unusual stature, and because that form now was Hilary's Irby was
aggrieved. All their days his cousin had been getting into his light,
and this realization still shaded his brow as Kincaid yielded Flora to
him and returned to Anna to talk of things too light for record.

Not so light were the thoughts Anna kept unuttered. Here again, she
reflected, was he who (according to Greenleaf) had declined to command
her guns in order to let Irby have them. Why? In kindness to his cousin,
or in mild dislike of a woman's battery? If intuition was worth while,
this man was soon to be a captain somewhere. Here was that rare find for
which even maidens' eyes were alert those days--a born leader. No
ladies' man this--"of all things on God's earth!" A men's man! And
yet--nay, _therefore_--a man for some unparagoned woman some day to
yield her heart and life to, and to have for her very own, herself his
consummate adornment. She cast a glance at Flora.

But her next was to him as they talked on. How nearly black was the
waving abundance of his hair. How placid his brow, above eyes whose long
lashes would have made them meltingly tender had they not been so large
with mirth: "A boy's eyes," thought she while he remembered what he had
just called hers. She noted his mouth, how gently firm: "A man's mouth!"

Charlie Valcour broke in between them: "Is there not going to be any
drill, after all?"

"Tell Captain Irby you can't wait any longer," replied Kincaid with a
mock frown and gave Anna yet gayer attention a minute more. Then he
walked beside his cousin toward the command, his horse close at his
back. The group, by pairs, chose view points. Only Miss Valcour stayed
in the carriage with the General, bent on effecting a change in his
mind. In Mobile Flora had been easily first in any social set to which
she condescended. In New Orleans, brought into the Callenders' circles by
her cousin Mandeville, she had found herself quietly ranked second to
Anna, and Anna now yet more pointedly outshining her through the brazen
splendor of this patriotic gift of guns. For this reason and others yet
to appear she had planned a strategy and begun a campaign, one of whose
earliest manoeuvres must be to get Irby, not Kincaid, made their uncle's
adjutant-general, and therefore to persuade the uncle that to give
Kincaid the battery would endear him to Anna and so crown with victory
the o