“You might carry a canteen, my dear.  I believe the regiments take out vivandieres—­there would be an outlet for your warlike emotions,” Mrs. Sprague said, with the purpose of cheering the unhappy spinster.

“Ah, no; I must not give encouragement to that dreadful Richard.  But we shall go now, thank Heaven, and it will comfort my sisters to have the boy back on Northern soil, even if he persists in being a soldier.”

She had a long talk with Jack on the subject.  That tempest-tossed knight convinced her that it would only incite the boy to more unruliness to persist in his quitting the army, or to urge him northward now, before an exchange was properly arranged.  Indeed, he was a prisoner—­taken in battle—­though his name did not appear on the lists.  So Vincent’s sudden going was welcomed as a stroke of good fortune.  The Atterburys, understanding the natural feelings of the family, made only perfunctory opposition.  Olympia and Kate were to remain until their brothers’ fates were decided.  Vincent, who had been for weeks wildly impatient to return to the field, was divided in mind now—­by joy and despair.  He had put off and put off a last appeal to Olympia.  He had not had an opportunity, or rather had too much opportunity—­and had, from day to day, deferred the longed-for yet dreaded decision.  When ready to speak, prudence whispered that it would be better to leave the question open until it should come up of itself.  She would learn every day to know him better in his own home, where all the artificialities of life are stripped from a man, by the concurrent abrasions of family love and domestic devoirs.  She would see that, however unworthy of her love he might have seemed in the old boyish days at Acredale, now he could be a man when manliness was demanded; that he could be patient, reticent, humble in the trials her caprice or coquetry put upon him.  She had, it seemed to him, deepened and broadened the current of his love during these blissful weeks of waiting.  Her very reserve, under the new conditions surrounding her, had made more luminous the beauty of her heart and mind.  She was no longer the airy, capricious Olympia of his college days.  The pensive gravity of misfortune and premature responsibility had ennobled and made more tangible the traits that had won him in her Northern home.  She had not avoided him during these weeks of purifying probation, as he feared she would.  Of late—­Jack’s state being secure—­she had revived much of the old vivacity, and deepened the thrall that held him.

But now the merry-making season which had opened before them was at an end.  The madrigals that welled up in his soft heart must sing themselves in the silence of the night, in the camp yonder, with no ears to comprehend, no heart to melt to them.  He should probably not get a chance to see her again during the conflict.  How long?  Perhaps a year—­for it would take two campaigns, as the rebel leaders reckoned,