For Mrs. Whately the girl now had a genuine and strong affection, chilled only by her belief that the plan in regard to the son was ever in the mother’s mind.  So indeed it was.  The sagacious woman watched Miss Lou closely and with feelings of growing hope as well as of tenderness.  The girl was showing a patience, a strength of mind, and, above all, a spirit of self-sacrifice which satisfied Mrs. Whately that she was the one of all the world for her son.

“I do believe,” she thought, “that if I can only make Louise think it will be best for us all as well as Madison, she will yield.  The spirit of self-sacrifice seems her supreme impulse.  Her sadness will pass away in time, and she would soon learn to love the father of her children.  What’s more, there is something about her now which would hold any man’s love.  See how her lightest wish controls those who work for her, even that harum-scarum Zany.”

In the late autumn a long-delayed letter threw Mrs. Whately into a panic of fear and anxiety.  A surgeon wrote that her son had been severely wounded and had lost his left arm, but that he was doing well.

Here the author laid down his pen.  In Mr. Roe’s journal, under date of July 11, is an entry alluding to a conversation with a friend.  That conversation concerned the conclusion of this book, and was, in effect, substantially the same as the outline given by him in a letter, part of which is quoted as follows: 

“It is not my purpose to dwell further on incidents connected with the close of the war, as the book may be considered too long already.  It only remains for me now to get all my people happy as soon as possible.  Zany and Chunk ‘make up,’ and a good deal of their characteristic love-making will be worked in to relieve the rather sombre state of things at this stage.  Whately returns with his empty sleeve, more of a hero than ever in his own eyes and his mother’s.  Miss Lou thinks him strangely thoughtful and considerate in keeping away, as he does, after a few short visits at The Oaks.  The truth is, he is wofully disappointed at the change in his cousin’s looks.  This pale, listless, hollow-eyed girl is not the one who set him to reading ‘Taming of the Shrew.’  That her beauty of color and of outline could ever return, he does not consider; and in swift revulsion of feeling secretly pays court elsewhere.

“Mrs. Whately, however, makes up for her son’s deficiencies.  Utterly ignorant how affairs are shaping, she works by her representations upon Miss Lou’s sympathies until the weary consent is wrung from the poor girl—­’Nothing matters to me any more!  If it makes you all happy—­why—­then—­But I must wait a year.’  She feels that her love for Allan Scoville will never be less, and that this period of time is little enough to devote to him in silent memory.