“Great Father!  A Yankee?” The poor woman sank on the nearest chair, as some one who has been nursing a patient that suddenly turns out to have small-pox or leprosy.

“Yes, Mrs. Raines:  if you prefer that name, I’m a Yankee—­but we call only New-Englanders Yankees.”  He waited for her to speak, but as she sat dumb, helpless, overcome, he continued:  “I tried to explain the mistake before, but your kindness cut me off.  I can only say that, though you have given me a mother’s care and a Christian’s consideration under a misunderstanding, I trust you will not blame me for willful deception nor regret the goodness you have shown the stranger in your hands.”

“And those men that brought you here—­were they Yankees, too?” she asked, her mind dwelling, womanlike, on the least essential factor of the problem in order to keep the grievous fact as far away as possible.

“Oh, no! they were your own people.  There was no collusion, I assure you.”  Jack almost laughed now, as the dialogue in the ambulance recurred to him, and the adroit use the men had made of their unconscious charges to secure a furlough.  “No; I was more amazed than I can say when I came to myself in this charming chamber—­a paradise it seemed to me, a home paradise—­when your kind face bent over my pillow.”

“It’s a cruel disappointment,” she said, rising and holding the back of the chair as she tilted it toward the bed.  “We were so proud of you—­so proud to have any one that had fought for our dear State in our own house to nurse, to bring back to life.  Every one on the street has some one from the battle, and oh, what will be said of us when people know that we—­we—­” But here the cruelty of the conclusion came too sharply to her mind, and she walked to the window, sobbing softly.

“I can understand, believe me, Mrs. Raines, and I am going to propose a means to you whereby I shall be taken from here, and your neighbors shall never know that you entertained an enemy unawares, though God knows I don’t see why we should be enemies when the battle is over.  If your son were in my condition I should think very hard of my mother if she were not to him what you have been to me.”

“But I can’t believe you’re a Yankee; you were so gentle, so patient in all the dreadful times when the surgeon was cutting and hacking.  Oh, I can’t believe it!  Oh, please say you are joking—­that you wanted to give me a fright.  And you have a mother?” She came over near the bed again and stood looking at him dismally, half in doubt, half in perplexed wonder; for Yankee, in her mind, suggested some such monster as the Greeks conjured when the Goths poured into the peninsula, maiming the men and debauching the women.  “I said Sprague wasn’t a Virginia name,” she murmered, plaintively, in a last desperate attempt to fortify herself against the worst; “but there’s no telling what names are in Virginia now, since Norfolk has grown so big and folks come in that way from all over the world.”