e in the role of
Anna's devotee and Hilary's "pilot," rich in long-thought-out
fabrications, but giving forth only what was wrung from her and parting
with each word as if it cost her a pang. Starving and sickening,
fighting and falling, the haggard boys watched; yet so faultless was the
maiden's art that when in a fury of affright at the risks of time she
one day forced their commander to see her heart's starvation for him the
battery saw nothing, and even to him she yet appeared faultless in
modesty and utterly, marvelously, splendidly ignorant of what she had
done.

"Guide right!" he mused alone. "At last, H.K., your nickname's got a
meaning worth living up to!"

While he mused, Flora, enraged both for him and against him, and with
the rage burning in her eye and on her brow, stood before her seated
grandmother, mutely giving gaze for gaze until the elder knew.

The old woman resumed her needle. "And all you have for it," was the
first word, "is his pity, eh?"

"Wait!" murmured the girl. "I will win yet, if I have to lose--"

"Yes?" skeptically simpered the grandam, "--have to lose yourself to do
it?"

The two gazed again until the maiden quietly nodded and her senior
sprang half up:

"No, no! ah, no-no-no! There's a crime awaiting you, but not that! Oh,
no, you are no such fool!"

"No?" The girl came near, bent low and with dancing eyes said, "I'll be
fool enough to lead him on till his sense of honor--"

"Sense of--oh, ho, ho!"

"Sense of his honor and _mine_--will make him my prisoner. Or else--!"
The speaker's eyes burned. Her bosom rose and fell.

"Yes," said the seated one--to her needle--"or else his sense that
Charlie--My God! don't pinch my ear off!"

"Happy thought," laughed Flora, letting go, "but a very poor guess."

LIX

IN A LABYRINTH

For ladies' funerals, we say, mortars and siege-guns, as a rule, do not
pause. But here at Vicksburg there was an hour near the end of each day
when the foe, for some mercy to themselves, ceased to bombard, and in
one of these respites that procession ventured forth in which rode the
fevered Anna: a farm wagon, a battered family coach, a carryall or two.

Yet in the midst of the graveyard rites there broke out on the unseen
lines near by, northward, an uproar of attack, and one or two shells
burst in plain view, frightening the teams. The company leaped into the
vehicles any way they could and started townward over a miserable road
with the c