“Look, Daddy—­two biscuits! Take one.  It’s—­it’s real!”

Cary’s eyes grew moist.

“Thank you, darling.  Thank you.”  Just now the lump in his throat would not have allowed him to eat soup, let alone a rather hard biscuit, but he looked up with a laugh and waved a genial salute to the trooper, who as genially responded.

Virgie, however, had become quite single minded since she had discovered food, and with a happy sigh she raised the biscuit to her lips.  Just then the sentry in the road flung up his hand with a shout.

“Look out, O’Connell!  They’re coming,” and he clambered quickly over the wall and dropped behind it, his gun in readiness.

“What is it?” demanded the other trooper.

“Detachment of cavalry.  A small one.”

“But whose is it, man.  Can ye not see?”

Collins, holding his hand behind him in a gesture which commanded them to stay where they were, raised his head cautiously over the wall.

“Morrison’s,” he answered, after a quick look, and he dropped down again out of sight.

At the sound of hoof beats and the name she remembered so well Virgie, with her biscuit all untasted, sprang up from the ground as if she would run out on the road.  But her father caught her, for O’Connell had turned to them with a serious face.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’ll have to trouble ye to get under cover in the woods.  No argymint, sir,” he said decisively, as he saw some show of resistance on Cary’s part.  “I’m under orders.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Cary cried, impatiently, “but I want to speak to Colonel Morrison.  I must speak to him.  Give me a moment, man.  You won’t ever regret it.”

“Come now—­none o’ that,” commanded the trooper, pushing him back with the carbine across his breast.  “Don’t make me use force, sir.  Ye’ll have to go—­so go quietly.  And mind—­no shenanigan!”

Cary stood his ground for a moment, meeting the trooper eye to eye—­then turned with hanging head and walked a few steps back into the woods.

“Come, Virgie,” he said, “I guess we won’t get to see Colonel Morrison after all.”

But Virgie, being a woman, had her own ideas about what she would or would not do.  At the same moment that the trooper was forcing her father step by step back into the woods, Virgie was running madly towards the stone wall and before either of the soldiers could stop her she had clambered up on its broad top and was calling out to a man who clattered by at the head of a troop of cavalry.

“Colonel Morrison!  Colonel Morrison!”

CHAPTER VIII

“Halt!”

At the sound of that piping, childish treble calling his name in so unexpected a place the officer at the head of the troop threw up his gauntleted hand and brought the detachment to a standstill in a cloud of dust.

“Hello, there,” he said, turning curiously around in his saddle.  “Who is it wants me?”