re, God's thunder and man's alike
ceased, and the merciful heavens smiled white and blue again. But their
smile was on the flag of the Union, and mutely standing in each other's
embrace, with hearts as nearly right as they could know, Anna and
Miranda gazed on the victorious stars-and-stripes and wept.

What caused Anna to start and glance behind she did not know; but doing
so she stared an instant breathless and then, as she clutched Miranda
for support, moaned to the tall, wasted, sadly smiling, crutched figure
that moved closer--

"Oh, Hilary! Are you Hilary Kincaid?"

LXX

GAINS AND LOSSES

They kissed.

It looks strange written and printed, but she did not see how to hold
off when he made it so tenderly manful a matter of course after his
frank hand-shake with Miranda, and when there seemed so little time for
words.

An ambulance drawn by the Callenders' horses had brought him and two or
three others down the West Side. A sail-boat had conveyed them from the
nearest beach. Here it was, now, in tow beside the steamboat as she
gathered headway toward Fort Powell. He was not so weak or broken but he
could point rapidly about with his crutches, the old light of command in
his eyes, while with recognized authority he spoke to the boat's master
and these companions.

He said things freely. There was not much down here to be secret about.
Mobile had not fallen. She would yet be fought for on land, furiously.
But the day was lost; as, incidentally, might be, at any moment, if not
shrewdly handled, this lonesome little boat.

Her captain moved to the pilot-house. Miranda and the junior officers
left Hilary with Anna. "Did you say 'the day,'" she softly asked, "or
'the bay'?"

"Both," he murmured, and with his two crutches in one hand directed her
eyes: to the fleet anchored midway off Morgan, Gaines, and Powell; to
the half-dozen gunboats on Mississippi Sound; to others still out in the
Gulf, behind Morgan, off Mobile Point; to the blue land force entrenched
behind Gaines, and to the dunes east of Morgan, where similar besiegers
would undoubtedly soon be landed.

"Yes ... Yes," she said to his few explanations. It was all so sadly
clear.

"A grand fort yet," he musingly called Morgan, "but it ought to be left
and blown to fare-you-well to-night before it's surroun--I wish my
cousin were there instead of in Gaines. 'Dolphe fights well, but he
knows when not to fight and that we've come, now, to where