yes and Miranda's baby
wrinkles. Yes, the Valcours, too, had, nevertheless, their monetary
gains, but these were quiet and exclusively from their ever dear,
however guilty, "rebel" friends, who could not help making presents to
Madame when brave Flora, spurning all rewards but their love, got for
them, by some spell they could not work, Federal indulgences; got them
through those one or two generals, who--odd coincidence!--always knew
the "rebel" city's latest "rebel" news and often made stern use of it.

Full believer likewise, and true sorrower, was Greenleaf, in Hilary's
death, having its seeming proof from Constance and Miranda as well as
from Flora. For in all that twelvemonth the Callenders had got no glad
tidings, even from Mandeville. Battle, march and devastation, march,
battle and devastation had made letters as scarce as good dreams, in
brightest Dixie. But darkest Dixie was New Orleans. There no three
"damned secesh" might stop on a corner in broadest sunlight and pass the
time of day. There the "rebel" printing-presses stood cold in dust and
rust. There churches were shut and bayonet-guarded because their
ministers would not read the prayers ordered by the "oppressor," and
there, for being on the street after nine at night, ladies of society,
diners-out, had been taken to the lock-up and the police-court. In New
Orleans all news but bad news was contraband to any "he or she adder,"
but four-fold contraband to the Callenders, the fairest member of whose
trio, every time a blue-and-gold cavalier forced her conversation, stung
him to silence with some word as mild as a Cordelia's. And yet,(you
demur,) in the course of a whole year, by some kind luck, surely the
blessed truth--Ah, the damsel on the tight-rope took care against that!
It was part of her dance to drop from that perch as daintily as a
bee-martin way-laying a hive, devour each home-coming word as he devours
bees, and flit back and twitter and flutter as a part of all nature's
harmony, though in chills of dismay at her peril and yet burning to go
to Hilary, from whom this task alone forever held her away.

So throughout that year Anna had been to Greenleaf the veiled widow of
his lost friend, not often or long, and never blithely met; loved more
ardently than ever, more reverently; his devotion holding itself in a
fancied concealment transparent to all; he defending and befriending
her, yet only as he could without her knowledge, and incurring-a cert