Greenleaf had come back with General Banks when Banks had succeeded Butler.  Oppressed with military cares, he had barely time to be, without scrutiny, a full believer in the Valcours’ loyalty to the Union.  Had they not avowed it to him when to breathe it was peril, on that early day when Irby’s command became Kincaid’s Battery, and in his days of Parish Prison and bazaar?  How well those words fitly spoken had turned out!  “Like apples of gold,” sang Flora to the timorous grandmother, “in wrappers of greenbacks.”

All the more a believer was he because while other faithfuls were making their loyalty earn big money off the government this genteel pair reminding him, that they might yet have to risk themselves inside the gray lines again to extricate Charlie, had kept their loyalty as gracefully hidden as of old except from a general or two.  Preoccupied Greenleaf, amiable generals, not to see that a loyalist in New Orleans stood socially at absolute zero, whereas to stand at the social ebullition point was more to the Valcours than fifty Unions, a hundred Dixies and heaven beside.  It was that fact, more than any other, save one, which lent intrepidity to Flora’s perpetual, ever quickening dance on the tight-rope of intrigue; a performance in which her bonny face had begun to betray her discovery that she could neither slow down nor dance backward.  However, every face had come to betray some cruel strain; Constance’s, Anna’s, even Victorine’s almond eyes and Miranda’s baby wrinkles.  Yes, the Valcours, too, had, nevertheless, their monetary gains, but these were quiet and exclusively from their ever dear, however guilty, “rebel” friends, who could not help making presents to Madame when brave Flora, spurning all rewards but their love, got for them, by some spell they could not work, Federal indulgences; got them through those one or two generals, who—­odd coincidence!—­always knew the “rebel” city’s latest “rebel” news and often made stern use of it.

Full believer likewise, and true sorrower, was Greenleaf, in Hilary’s death, having its seeming proof from Constance and Miranda as well as from Flora.  For in all that twelvemonth the Callenders had got no glad tidings, even from Mandeville.  Battle, march and devastation, march, battle and devastation had made letters as scarce as good dreams, in brightest Dixie.  But darkest Dixie was New Orleans.  There no three “damned secesh” might stop on a corner in broadest sunlight and pass the time of day.  There the “rebel” printing-presses stood cold in dust and rust.  There churches were shut and bayonet-guarded because their ministers would not read the prayers ordered by the “oppressor,” and there, for being on the street after nine at night, ladies of society, diners-out, had been taken to the lock-up and the police-court.  In New Orleans all news but bad news was contraband to any “he or she adder,” but four-fold contraband to the Callenders, the fairest member of whose trio, every