thing is the only
hard thing to do? Who, I? Connie! I don't even want it. I'm a craven; I
want the easy thing! I want to go nurse the box-carloads and
mule-wagonloads of wounded at Corinth, at Okolona and strewed all the
way down to Mobile--that's full of them. Hilary may be somewhere among
them--unidentified! They say he wore no badge of rank that morning, you
know, and carried the carbine of a wounded cavalryman to whom he had
given his coat. Oh, he's mine, Con, and I'm his. We're not engaged,
we're _married,_ and I _must_ go. It's only a step--except in miles--and
I'm going! I'm going for your sake and Miranda's. You know you're
staying on my account, not for me to settle this bazaar business but to
wait for news that's never coming till I go and bring it!"

This tiny, puny, paltry business of the bazaar--the whereabouts of the
dagger and its wealth, or of the detectives, gone for good into military
secret service at the front--she drearily smiled away the whole trivial
riddle as she lay of nights contriving new searches for that
inestimable, living treasure, whose perpetual "missing," right yonder
"almost in sight from the housetop," was a dagger in her heart.

And the Valcours? Yes, they, too, had their frantic impulses to rise and
fly. For Madame, though her lean bosom bled for the lost boy, the
fiercest pain of waiting was that its iron coercion lay in their
penury. For Flora its sharpest pangs were in her own rage; a rage not of
the earlier, cold sort against Anna and whoever belonged to Anna--that
transport had always been more than half a joy--but a new, hot rage
against herself and the finical cheapness of her scheming, a rage that
stabbed her fair complacency with the revelation that she had a heart,
and a heart that could ache after another. The knife of that rage turned
in her breast every time she cried to the grandam, "We must go!" and
that rapacious torment simpered, "No funds," adding sidewise hints
toward Anna's jewels, still diligently manoeuvred for, but still
somewhere up-stairs in Callender House, sure to go with Anna should Anna
go while the manoeuvrers were away.

A long lane to any one, was such waiting, lighted, for Anna, only by a
faint reflection of that luster of big generals' strategy and that
invincibility of the Southern heart which, to all New Orleans and even
to nations beyond seas, clad Dixie's every gain in light and hid her
gravest disasters in beguiling shadow. But suddenly one d