The nineteenth of April, in the evening, my door opened again with an impetuous bang; but this time it was Frank Addison, his eyes blazing, his dark cheek flushed, his whole aspect fired and furious.

“Good God, Sue! do you know what they’ve done in Baltimore?”

“What?” said I, in vague terror, for I had been an alarmist from the first:  I had once lived at the South.

“Fired on a Massachusetts regiment, and killed—­nobody knows how many yet; but killed, and wounded.”

I could not speak:  it was the lighted train of a powder-magazine burning before my eyes.  Frank began to walk up and down the room.

“I must go!  I must!  I must!” came involuntarily from his working lips.

“Frank!  Frank! remember Josephine.”

It was a cowardly thing to do, but I did it.  Frank turned ghastly white, and sat down in a chair opposite me.  I had, for the moment, quenched his ardor; he looked at me with anxious eyes, and drew a long sigh, almost a groan.

“Josephine!” he said, as if the name were new to him, so vitally did the idea seize all his faculties.

“Well, dear!” said a sweet little voice at the door.

Frank turned, and seemed to see a ghost; for there in the door-way stood “Kitten,” her face perhaps a shade calmer than ordinary, swinging in one hand the tasselled hood she wore of an evening, and holding her shawl together with the other.  Over her head we discerned the spare, upright shape of Mr. Bowen looking grim and penetrative, but not unkindly.

“What is the matter?” went on the little lady.

Nobody answered, but Frank and I looked at each other.  She came in now and went toward him, Mr. Bowen following at a respectful distance, as if he were her footman.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” said she, with the slightest possible suggestion of reserve, or perhaps timidity, in her voice.  “Father went first for me, and when you were not at Laura’s, or the office, or the post-office, or Mrs. Sledge’s, then I knew you were here; so I came with him, because—­because”—­she hesitated the least bit here—­“we love Sue.”

Frank still looked at her with his soul in his eyes, as if he wanted to absorb her utterly into himself and then die.  I never saw such a look before; I hope I never may again; it haunts me to this day.

I can pause now to recall and reason about the curious, exalted atmosphere that seemed suddenly to have surrounded us, as if bare spirits communed there, not flesh and blood.  Frank did not move; he sat and looked at her standing near him, so near that her shawl trailed against his chair; but presently when she wanted to grasp something, she moved aside and took hold of another chair,—­not his:  it a little thing, but it interpreted her.

“Well?” said he, in a hoarse tone.

Just then she moved, as I said, and laid one hand on the back of a chair:  it was the only symptom of emotion she showed; her voice was as childish-clear and steady as before.