“There she is.  My Gertrude—­my little Gertrude.”

Virgie leaned forward eagerly.

“Oh!” she said, in unaffected admiration, “She’s mighty pretty.  She’s—­” The child stopped suddenly, and raised her eyes.  “An’ she’s fat, too.  I reckon Gertrude gets lots to eat, doesn’t she?”

“Why, yes,” agreed the father, thinking of his comfortable Northern home; “of course.  Don’t you?”

Virgie weighed the question thoughtfully before she spoke.

“Sometimes—­when Daddy gets through the lines and brings it to me.”

The soldier started violently, wrenched back from the selfish dream of happiness that rose as he looked at the picture of his child.

“What!  Is that why your father comes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I didn’t know!  I thought he came—­”

He rose to his feet and turned away, his thoughts atumble, a pang of parental pity gnawing at his heart; then he wheeled and faced her, asking, with a break in his husky voice: 

“And at other times—­what do you eat, then?”

She made a quaint, depreciating gesture toward the appointments of her breakfast table.

“Blackberries—­an’—­an’ coffee made out of aco’ns.”

Again the troubled conqueror turned away.

“Oh, it’s a shame!” he muttered between his teeth.  “A wicked shame!”

He stood for a moment, silently, till Virgie spoke and jarred him with another confidence.

“My cousin Norris told me that the Yankees have bread every day; an’ tea—­an’ milk—­an’ everything. An’ butter!”

This last-named article of common diet was mentioned with an air of reverential awe; and, somehow, it hurt the well-fed Union officer far more than had she made some direct accusation against the invading armies of the North.

“Don’t, Virgie—­please,” he murmured softly.  “There are some things we just can’t bear to listen to—­even in times of war.”  He sighed and dropped into his former seat, striving gently to change the subject.  “You have lived here—­always?”

“Oh, no,” she assured him, with a lift of her small, patrician brows. “This is the overseer’s house. Our house used to be up on the hill, in the grove.”

“Used to be—?”

“Yes, sir.  But—­but the Yankees burnt it up.”

Morrison’s fist came down on the table with a crash.  He remembered now his raid of some months before upon this same plantation, so unfamiliar in its present neglected state.  Again he looked into the fearless eyes of a Southern gentlewoman who mocked him while her lover husband swam the river and escaped.  Again he saw the mansion wrapped in flame and smoke—­the work of a drunken fiend in his own command.  Yes, he remembered now; too well; then he turned to the child and spoke: 

“Tell me about it.  Won’t you?”

She nodded, wriggled from her chair, and stood beside the table.