Miss Boone was paling and blushing painfully.  “Dear Olympia, I hate to say it; but you should know it.  You will hear it elsewhere.  Cruel things like this always come out.  You know that feeling has been very bitter here since the dreadful attack on the Massachusetts soldiers in Baltimore?  Radicals make no distinction between Democrats and rebels, and—­I’m to say it—­but Mr. Atterbury is charged with being a spy here—­and—­and your family, being Democrats, are thought to sympathize with the rebels.  Of course, your friends know better.  I and many more know that the Atterburys and Spragues have been intimate for thirty years.  But in war-time people seem to lose their senses and change their opinions like lake breezes; prejudices grow like gourds, and the people who do least and talk loudest make public sentiment.”

“What an outrageous state of things!” Olympia cried, hotly.  “Our family sympathize with traitors indeed!  Why, it was my father who, in the Senate, upheld Jackson when he stamped out South Carolina in its rebellion.  Oh! it is monstrous, such a calumny.  Why, just think of it!  The only man in the family is a private soldier, when he might have been high in rank, with such influences as we could bring to bear.  O Kate! it almost makes one pray for a defeat to punish such ingrates!”

“Yes; but for Heaven’s sake don’t let any one hear you say such a thing—­for your brother’s sake!  He is already the victim of the feeling I have spoken about.  He was to have had the captaincy of the first one hundred men he raised.  But the Governor has been made to change the usual rule, and the colonel is to appoint the officers.”

“And Jack isn’t to have a commission?”

“No, not now; only men of the war party are to be made officers.”

“Good heavens!  Nobody could be more eager for the war than Jack.  It is his passion.  His delight in it shocks my mother, who hates war.  What stronger evidence of sympathy for the cause could he show than joining the army before finishing college?”

“But he is a Democrat—­and—­and—­only Republicans are to be trusted at first.”  Miss Boone blushed as she stammered this, for it was her own father, in his function as chairman of the war committee, who had insisted upon this discrimination.  Worse still, but this Kate did not mention—­it was Boone’s own work that kept Jack from his expected epaulets.  There had long been a feud between Boone and the late Senator Sprague, and Olympia conjectured most of what the daughter reserved.

“Your brother has done wonders, everybody says; he has the finest fellows in the township, and he ought to be colonel, at least,” Miss Boone said, rising to go.

“Oh, I have no fear that he will not win his way,” Olympia replied, cheerfully.  “The brave in battle are captains, no matter what rank they hold.”