They sat a great deal at this window of theirs.  It was a sort of instinct and habit with them, and it made them happier than almost anything else,—­sitting at a window together.  It was home to them because at home they lived so:  life and duty were so framed in for them,—­in one dear old window-recess.  Sometimes they thought that it would he heaven to them by and by:  that such a seat, and such a quiet, happy outlook, they should find kept for them together, in the Father’s mansion, up above.

At home, it was up three flights of stairs, in a tall, narrow city house, of which the lower floors overflowed with young, boisterous half brothers and sisters,—­the tide not seldom rising and inundating their own retreat,—­whose delicate mother, not more than eight years older than her eldest step-daughter, was tied hand and foot to her nursery, with a baby on her lap, and the two or three next above with hands always to be washed, disputes and amusements always to be settled, small morals to be enforced, and clean calico tiers to be incessantly put on.

And Susan and Martha sat upstairs and made the tiers.

Mr. Josselyn was a book-keeper, with a salary of eighteen hundred dollars, and these seven children.  And Susan and Martha were girls of fair culture, and womanly tastes, and social longings.  How does this seem to you, young ladies, and what do you think of their upstairs life together, you who calculate, if you calculate at all, whether five hundred dollars may carry you respectably through your half-dozen city assemblies, where you shine in silk and gossamer, of which there will not be “a dress in the room that cost less than seventy-five dollars,” and come home, after the dance, “a perfect rag”?

Two years ago, when you were perhaps performing in tableaux for the “benefit of the Sanitary,” these two girls had felt the great enthusiasm of the time lay hold of them in a larger way.  Susan had a friend—­a dear old intimate of school-days, now a staid woman of eight-and-twenty—­who was to go out in yet maturer companionship into the hospitals.  And Susan’s heart burned to go.  But there were all the little tiers, and the ABC’s, and the faces and fingers.

“I can do it for a while,” said Martha, “without you.”  Those two words held the sacrifice.  “Mamma is so nicely this summer, and by and by Aunt Lucy may come, perhaps.  I can do quite well.”

So Martha sat, for months and months, in the upstairs window alone.  There were martial marchings in the streets beneath; great guns thundered out rejoicings; flags filled the air with crimson and blue, like an aurora; she only sat and made little frocks and tiers for the brothers and sisters.  God knew how every patient needle thrust was really also a woman’s blow for her country.

And now, pale and thin with close, lonely work, the time had come to her at last when it was right to take a respite; when everybody said it must be; when Uncle David, just home from Japan, had put his hand in his pocket and pulled out three new fifty-dollar bills, and said to them in his rough way, “There, girls!  Take that, and go your lengths.”  The war was over, and among all the rest here were these two women-soldiers honorably discharged, and resting after the fight.  But nobody at Outledge knew anything of the story.