gilded officers conferred alertly in pairs or threes, more
or less in the way of younger ones who smartly crossed from room to
room. Here came Greenleaf! Seeking her? No, he would have passed
unaware, but her lips ventured his name.

Never had she seen such a look in his face as that with which he
confronted her. Grief, consternation, discovery and wrath were all as
one save that only the discovery and wrath meant her. She saw how for
two days and nights he had been putting this and that and this and that
and this and that together until he had guessed her out. Sternly in his
eyes she perceived contumely withholding itself, yet even while she felt
the done-for cry heave through her bosom, and the floor fail like a
sinking deck, she clung to her stage part, babbled impromptu lines.

"Doctor Sevier--?" she began--

"He had to go."

Again she read the soldier's eyes. God! he was comparing her changed
countenance--a fool could see he was!--with Anna's! both smitten with
affliction, but the abiding peace of truth in one, the abiding war of
falsehood in the other. So would Kincaid do if he were here! But the
stage waited: "Ah, Colonel, Anna! poor Anna!" Might not the
compassion-wilted supplicant see the dear, dear prisoner? She rallied
all her war-worn fairness with all her feminine art, and to her
amazement, with a gleam of purpose yet without the softening of a
lineament, he said yes, waved permission across to the guard and left
her.

She passed the guard and knocked. Quietly in the room clinked the
brick-mason's work. He strongly hummed his tune. Now he spoke, as if to
his helper, who seemed to be leaving him. Again she knocked, and bent
her ear. The mason sang aloud:

"Some day dis worl' come to an en',
I don't know how, I don't know when--"

She turned the door-knob and murmured, "Anna!"

The bricklaying clinked, tapped and scraped on. The workman hummed again
his last two lines.

"Who is it?" asked a feigned voice which she knew so instantly to be
Kincaid's that every beat of her heart jarred her frame.

"'Tis I, Anna, dear. 'Tis Flora." She was mindful of the sentry, but
all his attention was in the busy hall.

There came a touch on the inner door-knob. "Go away!" murmured the manly
voice, no longer disguised. "In God's name! for your own sake as well as
hers, go instantly!"

"No," melodiously replied Flora, in full voice for the sentry's ear, but
with resolute pressure on the door, "no, not at a