“You are, indeed,” he said; and Phyllis turned to give Basil a parting smile.

Crittenden followed them to the Colonel’s tent, which had a raised floor and the good cheer of cigar-boxes, and of something under his cot that looked like a champagne-basket; and he smiled to think of Chaffee’s Spartan-like outfit at Chickamauga.  Every now and then a soldier would come up with a complaint, and the Colonel would attend to him personally.

It was plain that the old ex-Confederate was the father of the regiment, and was beloved as such; and Crittenden was again struck with the contrast it all was to what he had just seen, knowing well, however, that the chief difference was in the spirit in which regular and volunteer approached the matter in hand.  With one, it was a business pure and simple, to which he was trained.  With the other, it was a lark at first, but business it soon would be, and a dashing business at that.  There was the same crowd before the tent—­Judith, who greeted him with gracious frankness, but with a humorous light in her eye that set him again to wondering; and Phyllis and Phyllis’s mother, Mrs. Stanton, who no sooner saw Crittenden than she furtively looked at Judith with a solicitude that was maternal and significant.

There can be no better hot-bed of sentiment than the mood of man and woman when the man is going to war; and if Mrs. Stanton had not shaken that nugget of wisdom from her memories of the old war, she would have known it anyhow, for she was blessed with a perennial sympathy for the heart-troubles of the young, and she was as quick to apply a remedy to the children of other people as she was to her own, whom, by the way, she cured, one by one, as they grew old enough to love and suffer, and learn through suffering what it was to be happy.  And how other mothers wondered how it was all done!  In truth, her method—­if she had a conscious method—­was as mysterious and as sure as is the way of nature; and one could no more catch her nursing a budding passion here and there than one could catch nature making the bluegrass grow.  Everybody saw the result; nobody saw just how it was done.  That afternoon an instance was at hand.  Judith wanted to go home, and Mrs. Stanton, who had brought her to camp, wanted to go to town.  Phyllis, too, wanted to go home, and her wicked little brother, Walter, who had brought her, climbed into Basil’s brake before her eyes, and, making a face at her, disappeared in a cloud of dust.  Of course, neither of the brothers nor the two girls knew what was going on, but, a few minutes later, there was Basil pleading with Mrs. Stanton to let him take Phyllis home, and there was Crittenden politely asking the privilege of taking Judith into his buggy.  The girl looked embarrassed, but when Mrs. Stanton made a gracious feint of giving up her trip to town, Judith even more graciously declined to allow her, and, with a smile to Crittenden, as though he were a conscious partner in her effort to save Mrs. Stanton