Anna beamingly laid her fingers on the lips of the enthusiast:  “Con!—­Miranda!—­we can have a bazaar right in this house!  Every friend we’ve got, and every friend of the bat’—­Oh, come in, Flora Valcour! you’re just in the nick o’ time—­a second Kirby Smith at Manassas!”

Thus came the free-gift lottery and bazaar of Callender House.  For her own worth as well as to enlist certain valuable folk from Mobile, Flora was, there and then—­in caucus, as it were—­nominated chairman of everything.  “Oh, no, no, no!”—­“Oh, yes, yes, yes!”—­she “yielded at last to overpowering numbers.”

But between this first rapturous inception and an all-forenoon argumentation on its when, who, how, what, and for what, other matters claimed notice.  “Further news from Charlie!  How was his wound?  What! a letter from his own hand—­with full account of—­what was this one? not a pitched battle, but—?”

“Anyhow a victory!” cried Constance.

“You know, Flora, don’t you,” asked Miranda, “that the battery’s ordered away across to Tennessee?”

Flora was genuinely surprised.

“Yes,” put in Constance, “to rejoin Beauregard—­and Brodnax!”

Flora turned to Anna:  “You have that by letter?”

“No!” was the too eager reply, “It’s here in the morning paper.”  They read the item.  The visitor flashed as she dropped the sheet.

“Now I see!” she sorely cried, and tapped Charlie’s folded letter.  “My God!  Anna, wounded like that, Hilary Kincaid is letting my brother go with them!”

“Oh-h-h!” exclaimed the other two, “but—­my dear! if he’s so much better that he can be allowed—­”

“Allowed!—­and in those box-car’!—­and with that snow—­rain—­gangrene—­lockjaw—­my God!  And when ‘twas already arrange’ to bring him home!”

Slow Callenders! not to notice the word “bring” in place of “send”:  “Ah, good, Flora! ah, fine!  You’ll see!  The dear boy’s coming that far with the battery only on his way home to us!”

“H-m-m!” Flora nodded in sore irony, but then smiled with recovered poise:  “From Tennessee who will bring him—­before they have firs’ fight another battle?—­and he—­my brother?”—­her smile grew droll.

“Your brother sure to be in it!” gasped Anna.  The Callenders looked heart-wrung, but Flora smiled on as she thought what comfort it would be to give each of them some life-long disfigurement.

Suddenly Constance cheered up:  “Flora, I’ve guessed something!  Yes, I’ve guessed who was intending—­and, maybe, still intends—­to bring him!”

Flora turned prettily to Anna:  “Have you?”

Quite as prettily Anna laughed.  “Connie does the guessing for the family,” she said.

Flora sparkled:  “But don’t you know—­perchanze?”

Anna laughed again and blushed to the throat as she retorted, “What has that to do with our bazaar?”

It had much to do with it.