is dazzling September
morning, seemed doomed to go first over the brink. Had not both Hilary
and Anna met again this Greenleaf and through him found answer for all
their burning questions? She could not doubt her web of deceptions had
been torn to shreds, cast to the winds. Not one of the three could she
now hope to confront successfully, much less any two of them together.
To name no earlier reason--having reached town just as Kincaid was being
sent out of it, she had got him detained on a charge so frivolous that
how to sustain it now before Greenleaf and his generals she was tortured
to contrive.

Yet something must be done. The fugitive must be retaken and retained,
the rival deported, and, oh, Hilary Kincaid! as she recalled her last
moment with you on that firing-line behind Vicksburg, shame and rage
outgrew despair, and her heart beat hot in a passion of chagrin and then
hotter, heart and brain, in a frenzy of ownership, as if by spending
herself she had bought you, soul and body, and if only for
self-vindication would have you from all the universe.

"The last wager and the last card," she smilingly remarked to her
kinswoman, "they sometimes win out," and as the smile passed added, "I
wish I had that bread-knife."

To Doctor Sevier her cry was, "Oh, yes, yes! Dear Anna! Poor Anna! Yes,
before I have to see any one else, even Colonel Greenleave! Ah, please,
Doctor, beg him he'll do me that prizelezz favor, and that for the good
God's sake he'll keep uz, poor Anna and me, not long waiting!"

Yet long were the Valcours kept. It was the common fate those days. But
Flora felt no title to the common fate, and while the bustle of the
place went on about them she hiddenly suffered and, mainly for the
torment it would give her avaricious companion, told a new reason for
the look in her eyes. Only a few nights before she had started wildly
out of sleep to find that she had _dreamed_ the cause of Anna's
irreconcilable distress for the loss of the old dagger. The dream was
true on its face, a belated perception awakened by bitterness of soul,
and Madame, as she sat dumbly marvelling at its tardiness, chafed the
more against each minute's present delay, seeing that now to know if
Kincaid, or if Anna, held the treasure was her liveliest hankering.

Meantime the captive Anna was less debarred than they. As Greenleaf and
the Doctor, withdrawing, shut her door, and until their steps died away,
she had stood by her table, he