The present floated still further away.

Even the rush of the torrent died out of my ears.

Once more it seemed to me that lovely day in May when we three had marched, shoulder to shoulder, down the city street—­that spring day in the early sixties, when the North was sending her flower to fight for a united country.

Again I felt the warm sunshine on my head.

Once more I heard the ringing cheers, saw the floating flags, and the faces of women who wept as well as women who smiled in the throngs that lined the street.

Just as in all my life it had been his emotions and his enthusiasms that led me, it was his excitement that impelled me forward at this moment.  His was the hand that in my school days, at college, in our Bohemian days abroad, had swept my responsive nature as a master hand strikes a harp, and made harmonies or discords at his will—­or, I should say, according to his mood.

I used to think in those days that he never willfully wronged any one, but I had to own also that he never deliberately sacrificed himself for any one.  And, if I were the victim of his temperament, he was no less so.  But he was an artist.  I was not.  All things either good or bad were merely material to him.  With me it was different.

He and I were alone in the world.  But beside us marched, that May morning, with the glory of youth on his handsome but weak face, one whose “baptism of fire” was to make him a hero, who had else been remembered a coward.

The story of the girl he had wronged, and fear of whom had even reconciled his family to his enlisting, was common property, and had been for several seasons.  There was a child, too, a little daughter, fondly loved, but unacknowledged, the fame of whose childish beauty many a heedless voice had already sung.

He, poor youngster, looked on his all that morning.

Once more I saw the flag draped house where his mother waved a brave farewell to him.

But there was another later picture in my mind.  Again I heard the blare of the band before us as it flung its satire of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” into the spring air.  I saw once more in my mind the child, with her floating red gold curls, raised above the crowd on the shoulders of tall men.  Her eyes were too young for tears—­and for that matter, tears came to her but seldom in later years—­and the lips that shouted “bood-bye” smiled, unconscious of bravery, as she swung her hat with its symbolic colors above her shining head.

That was the picture that three of us carried to the front.

We left him—­all his errors redeemed by a noble death—­with his face turned up to the stars, as silent, as mysterious as they, after our first battle.

From the horrors of that night we two came away bound by an oath to care for that child.

* * * * *

Again my memory shifted to the days that found her a woman.  Fair, beautiful, dainty, her father’s daughter in looks, but inheriting from a rare mother a peculiar strength of character, a moral force rarely found with such a temperament and such beauty.