We followed quickly to the porch, to look after him.  But he strode off so fast that Cornelius had to run to keep up with him.  He did not once look back, even when he passed out of sight at the street corner.  I believe he divined that his wife would not be among those looking after, and that he wished not to interpose any other last impression of his dear home than that of her kiss.

When we came back into the hall, she had flown.  Later, as my mother and I went through the garden homeward, passing beneath Margaret’s open windows, we heard her weeping—­not violently, but steadily, monotonously, as if she had a long season of the past to regret, a long portion of the future to sorrow for.  And here let me say that I think Margaret, from first to last, loved Philip with more tenderness than she was capable of bestowing upon any one else; with an affection so deep that sometimes it might be obscured by counter feelings playing over the surface of her heart, so deep that often she might not be conscious of its presence, but so deep that it might never be uprooted:—­and ’twas that which made things the more pitiful.

Tom and I went out, with a large number of the town’s people, to watch the rebel soldiers depart, and we saw Philip with his company, and exchanged with him a smile and a wave of the hat.  How little we thought that one of us he was never to meet again, that the other he was not to see in many years, and that four of those years were to pass ere he should set foot again in Queen Street.

Many things, to be swiftly passed over in my history, occurred in those four years.  One of these, the most important to me, happened a short time after Philip’s departure for the North.  It was a brief conversation with Fanny, and it took place upon the wayside walk at what they call the Battery, at the green Southern end of the town, where it is brought to a rounded point by the North and East Rivers approaching each other as they flow into the bay.  To face the gentle breeze, I stopped and turned so we might look Southward over the bay, toward where, at the distant Narrows, Long Island and Staten Island seem to meet and close it in.

“I don’t like to look out yonder,” said Fanny.  “It makes me imagine I’m away on the ocean, by myself.  And it seems so lonely.”

“Why, you poor child,” replied I, “’tis a sin you should ever feel lonely; you do so much to prevent others being so.”  I turned my back upon the bay, and led her past the fort, toward the Broadway.  “You see,” said I, abruptly, glancing at her brown eyes, which dropped in a charming confusion, “how much you need a comrade.”  I remember I was not entirely unconfused myself at that moment, for inspiration had suddenly shown me my opportunity, and how to use it, and some inward trepidation was inseparable from a plunge into the matter I was now resolved upon going through.

“Why,” says she, blushing, and seeming, as she walked, to take a great interest in her pretty feet, “I have several comrades as it is.”