He said things freely.  There was not much down here to be secret about.  Mobile had not fallen.  She would yet be fought for on land, furiously.  But the day was lost; as, incidentally, might be, at any moment, if not shrewdly handled, this lonesome little boat.

Her captain moved to the pilot-house.  Miranda and the junior officers left Hilary with Anna.  “Did you say ‘the day,’” she softly asked, “or ’the bay’?”

“Both,” he murmured, and with his two crutches in one hand directed her eyes:  to the fleet anchored midway off Morgan, Gaines, and Powell; to the half-dozen gunboats on Mississippi Sound; to others still out in the Gulf, behind Morgan, off Mobile Point; to the blue land force entrenched behind Gaines, and to the dunes east of Morgan, where similar besiegers would undoubtedly soon be landed.

“Yes ...  Yes,” she said to his few explanations.  It was all so sadly clear.

“A grand fort yet,” he musingly called Morgan, “but it ought to be left and blown to fare-you-well to-night before it’s surroun—­I wish my cousin were there instead of in Gaines.  ’Dolphe fights well, but he knows when not to fight and that we’ve come, now, to where every man we’ve got, and every gun, counts bigger than to knock out any two of the enemy’s.  You know Fred’s over yonder, don’t you? and that Kincaid’s Battery, without their field-pieces, are just here in Powell behind her heavy guns?...  Yes, Victorine said you did; I saw her this morning, with Constance.”  He paused, and then spoke lower: 

“Beloved?”

She smiled up to him.

“Our love’s not through all the fire, yet,” he said, but her smile only showed more glow.

“My soul’s-mate, war-mate soldier-girl,” he murmured on.

“Well?”

“If you stand true in what’s before us now, before just you and me, now and for weeks to come, I want your word for it right here that your standing true shall not be for the sake of any vow you’ve ever made to me, or for me, or with me, in the past, the blessed, blessed past.  You promise?”

“I promise,” she breathed.  “What is it?”

“A thing that takes more courage than I’ve got.”

“Then how will you do it?” she lightly asked.

“By borrowing all yours.  May I?”

“You may.  Is it to save—­our battery?”

“Our battery, yes, against their will, with others, if I can persuade the fort’s commander.  At low tide to-night when the shoals can be forded to Cedar Point, I shall be”—­his words grew hurried—­the steamer was touching the fort’s pier—­the sail-boat, which was to take Anna and Miranda to where the ambulance and their own horses awaited them had cast off her painter—­“I shall be the last man out of Powell and shall blow it up.  Come, it may be we sha’n’t meet again until I’ve”—­he smiled—­“been court-martialed and degraded.  If I am, we—­”

“If you are,” she murmured, “you may take me to the nearest church—­or the biggest—­that day.”