hem, lingered in the roses; hovered so close to the path that he
might have touched its occupants as they moved back and forth;
almost--to quote his uncle--

"Sat in the roses and heard the birds sing"--

heard blue birds, in soft notes not twittered, muttered as by owls,
revealing things priceless for Mobile to know.

Bragg's gray army, he heard, was in far Chattanooga facing Rosecrans,
and all the slim remnants of Johnston's were hurrying to its
reinforcement. Mobile was merely garrisoned. Little was there save
artillery. Here in New Orleans lay thousands of veterans flushed with
their up-river victories, whose best and quickest aid to Rosecrans would
be so to move as to turn Bragg's reinforcements back southward. A
cavalry dash across the pine-barrens of East Louisiana to cut the
railroad along the Mississippi-Alabama line, a quick joint movement of
land and naval forces by way of the lakes, sound, and gulf, and Mobile
would fall. These things and others, smaller yet more startling, the
listener learned of, not as pastime talk, but as a vivid scheme already
laid, a mine ready to be sprung if its secret could be kept three days
longer; and now he hurried after his four compatriots, his own brain
teeming with a counter-plot to convey this secret through the dried-up
swamps to the nearest Confederate telegraph station while Anna should
bear it (and the recovered treasure) by boat to Mobile, two messengers
being so many times surer than one.

Early next morning Madame Valcour, entering an outer room from an inner
one, found Flora writing a note. The girl kept on, conscious that her
irksome critic was taking keen note of a subtle, cruel decay of her
beauty, a spiritual corrosion that, without other fault to the eye, had
at last reached the surface in a faint hardening of lines and staleness
of bloom. Now she rose, went out, dispatched her note and returned. Her
manner, as the two sat down to bread and coffee, was bright though
tense.

"From Greenleaf?" inquired her senior, "and to the same?"

The girl shook her fair head and named one of his fellow-officers at
Callender House: "No, Colonel Greenleaf is much too busy. Hilary Kincaid
has--"

"Esca-aped?" cried the aged one, flashed hotly, laughed, flashed again
and smiled. "That Victorine kitten--with her cakes! And you--and
Greenleaf--hah! you three cats paws--of one little--Anna!"

Flora jauntily wagged a hand, then suddenly rose and pointed with a big
bread k