The afternoon grew colder, as he stood looking out of the guard-house.  Snow began to whiten through the gray.  He thrust out his arm through the wicket, his face kindling with childish pleasure, as he looked closer at the fairy stars and crowns on his shaggy sleeve.  If Floy were here!  She never had seen snow.  When the flakes had melted off, he took a case out of his pocket to look at Floy.  His sister,—­a little girl who had no mother, nor father, nor lover, but Lamar.  The man among his brother officers in Richmond was coarse, arrogant, of dogged courage, keen palate at the table, as keen eye on the turf.  Sickly little Floy, down at home, knew the way to something below all this:  just as they of the Rommany blood see below the muddy boulders of the streets the enchanted land of Boabdil bare beneath.  Lamar polished the ivory painting with his breath, remembering that he had drunk nothing for days.  A child’s face, of about twelve, delicate,—­a breath of fever or cold would shatter such weak beauty; big, dark eyes, (her mother was pure Castilian,) out of which her little life looked irresolute into the world, uncertain what to do there.  The painter, with an unapt fancy, had clustered about the Southern face the Southern emblem, buds of the magnolia, unstained, as yet, as pearl.  It angered Lamar, remembering how the creamy whiteness of the full-blown flower exhaled passion of which the crimsonest rose knew nothing,—­a content, ecstasy, in animal life.  Would Floy——­Well, God help them both! they needed help.  Three hundred souls was a heavy weight for those thin little hands to hold sway over,—­to lead to hell or heaven.  Up North they could have worked for her, and gained only her money.  So Lamar reasoned, like a Georgian:  scribbling a letter to “My Baby” on the wrapper of a newspaper,—­drawing the shapes of the snowflakes,—­telling her he had reached their grandfather’s plantation, but “have not seen our Cousin Ruth yet, of whom you may remember I have told you, Floy.  When you grow up, I should like you to be just such a woman; so remember, my darling, if I”——­He scratched the last words out:  why should he hint to her that he could die?  Holding his life loose in his hand, though, had brought things closer to him lately,—­God and death, this war, the meaning of it all.  But he would keep his brawny body between these terrible realities and Floy, yet awhile.  “I want you,” he wrote, “to leave the plantation, and go with your old maumer to the village.  It will be safer there.”  He was sure the letter would reach her.  He had a plan to escape to-night, and he could put it into a post inside the lines.  Ben was to get a small hand-saw that would open the wicket; the guards were not hard to elude.  Glancing up, he saw the negro stretched by a camp-fire, listening to the gaunt boatman, who was off duty.  Preaching Abolitionism, doubtless:  he could hear Ben’s derisive shouts of laughter.  “And so, good bye, Baby Florence!” he scrawled.  “I wish I could send you some of this snow, to show you what the floor of heaven is like.”