You may remember how once she had gone feeling and prying along the fair woodwork of these rooms for any secret of construction it might hold.  Lately, when the house began to fill with secretable things of large money value, she had done this again, and this time, in one side of a deep chimney-breast, had actually found a most innocent-looking panel which she fancied to be kept from sliding only by its paint.  Now while she said her sweet thanks to Anna and Hilary she could almost believe in fairies, the panel was so near the store of old jewels.  With the knife she might free the panel, and behind the panel hide the jewels till their scent grew cold, to make them her bank account when all the banks should be broken, let the city fall or stand.  No one need ever notice, so many were parting with their gems perforce, so many buying them as a form of asset convenient for flight.  So good-night, old dagger and jewels; see you again, but don’t overdo your limited importance.  Of the weapon Flora had further learned that it was given not to the Bazaar but to Anna, and of the jewels that they were not in that lottery of everything, with which the affair was to end and the proceeds of whose tickets were pouring in upon Anna, acting treasurer, the treasurer being ill.

Tormentingly in Hilary’s way was this Lottery and Bazaar.  Even from Anna, sometimes especially from Anna, he could not understand why certain things must not be told or certain things could not be done until this Bazaar—­etc.  Why, at any hour he might be recalled!  Yes, Anna saw that—­through very moist eyes.  True, also, she admitted, Beauregard and Johnston might fail to hold off Buell and Grant; and true, as well, New Orleans could fall, and might be sacked.  It was while confessing this that with eyes down and bosom heaving she accepted the old Italian knife.  Certainly unless the pooh-poohing Mandeville was wrong, who declared the forts down the river impregnable and Beauregard, on the Tennessee, invincible, flight (into the Confederacy) was safest—­but—­the Bazaar first, flight afterward.  “We women,” she said, rising close before him with both hands in his, “must stand by our guns.  We’ve no more right”—­it was difficult to talk while he kissed her fingers and pressed her palms to his gray breast—­“no more right—­to be cowards—­than you men.”

Her touch brought back his lighter mood and he told the happy thought—­project—­which had come to him while they talked with the jeweller.  He could himself “do the job,” he said, “roughly but well enough.”  Anna smiled at the fanciful scheme.  Yet—­yes, its oddity was in its favor.  So many such devices were succeeding, some of them to the vast advantage of the Southern cause.