“If anything should happen to him, Sue, it will kill her,” she said.  “She never can lose him and live.  Poor little thing! how could Mr. Bowen let her marry him?”

“Mr. Bowen lets her do much as she likes, Laura, and always has, I imagine.”

“Yes, she has been a spoiled child, I know, but it is such a pity!”

“Has she been spoiled?  I believe, as a general thing, more children are spoiled by what the Scotch graphically call ‘nagging’ than by indulgence.  What do you think Josey would have been, if Mrs. Brooks had been her mother?”

“I don’t know, quite; unhappy, I am sure; for Mrs. Brooks’s own children look as if they had been fed on chopped catechism, and whipped early every morning, ever since they were born.  I never went there without hearing one or another of them told to sit up, or sit down, or keep still, or let their aprons alone, or read their Bibles; and Joe Brooks confided to me in Sunday-school that he called Deacon Smith ’old bald-head,’ one day, in the street, to see if a bear wouldn’t come and eat him up, he was so tired of being a good boy!”

“That’s a case in point, I think, Laura; but what a jolly little boy! he ought to have a week to be naughty in, directly.”

“He never will, while his mother owns a rod!” said she, emphatically.

I had beguiled Laura from her subject; for, to tell the truth, it was one I did not dare to contemplate; it oppressed and distressed me too much.

After Laura went home, we stayed in Dartford only a week, and then followed the regiment to Washington.  We had been there but a few days, before it was ordered into service.  Frank came into my room one night to tell me.

“We must be off to-morrow, Sue,—­and you must take her back to Ridgefield at once.  I can’t have her here.  I have told Mr. Bowen.  If we should be beaten,—­and we may,—­raw troops may take a panic, or may fight like veterans,—­but if we should run, they will make a bee-line for Washington.  I should go mad to have her here with a possibility of Rebel invasion.  She must go; there is no question.”

He walked up and down the room, then came back and looked me straight in the face.

“Susan, if I never come back, you will be her good friend, too?”

“Yes,” said I, meeting his eye as coolly as it met mine:  I had learned a lesson of Josey.  “I shall see you in the morning?”

“Yes”; and so he went back to her.

Morning came.  Josephine was as bright, as calm, as natural, as the June day itself.  She insisted on fastening “her Captain’s” straps on his shoulders, purloined his cumbrous pin-ball and put it out of sight, and kept even Mrs. Bowen’s sobs in subjection by the intense serenity of her manner.  The minutes seemed to go like beats of a fever-pulse; ten o’clock smote on a distant bell; Josephine had retreated, as if accidentally, to a little parlor of her own, opening from our common