Was it out of consideration for her that Mrs. Brice would turn the Judge from this topic which he seemed to love best?  Virginia could not admit to herself that she resented this.  She had heard Stephen’s letters to the Judge.  They came every week.  Strong and manly they were, with plenty of praises for the Southern defenders of Vicksburg.  Only yesterday Virginia had read one of these to Mr. Whipple, her face burning.  Well that his face was turned to the window, and that Stephen’s mother was not there!

“He says very little about himself,” Mr. Whipple complained.  “Had it not been for Brinsmade, we should never know that Sherman had his eye on him, and had promoted him.  We should never have known of that exploit at Chickasaw Bluff.  But what a glorious victory was Grant’s capture of Vicksburg, on the Fourth of July!  I guess we’ll make short work of the Rebels now.”

No, the Judge had not changed much, even in illness.  He would never change.  Virginia laid the letter down, and tears started to her eyes as she repressed a retort.  It was not the first time this had happened.  At every Union victory Mr. Whipple would loose his tongue.  How strange that, with all his thought of others, he should fall short here!

One day, after unusual forbearance, Mrs. Brice had overtaken Virginia on the stairway.  Well she knew the girl’s nature, and how difficult she must have found repression.  Margaret Brice had taken her hand.

“My dear,” she had said, “you are a wonderful woman.”  That was all.  But Virginia had driven back to Belle. garde with a strange elation in her heart.

Some things the Judge had forborne to mention, and for this Virginia was thankful.  One was the piano.  But she had overheard Shadrach telling old Nancy how Mrs. Brice had pleaded with him to move it, that he might have more room and air.  He had been obdurate.  And Colonel Carvel’s name had never once passed his lips.

Many a night the girl had lain awake listening to the steamboats as they toiled against the river’s current, while horror held her.  Horror lest her father at that moment be in mortal agony amongst the heaps left by the battle’s surges; heaps in which, like mounds of ashes, the fire was not yet dead.  Fearful tales she had heard in the prison hospitals of wounded men lying for days in the Southern sun between the trenches at Vicksburg, or freezing amidst the snow and sleet at Donelson.

Was her bitterness against the North not just?  What a life had been Colonel Carvel’s!  It had dawned brightly.  One war had cost him his wife.  Another, and he had lost his fortune, his home, his friends, all that was dear to him.  And that daughter, whom he loved best in all the world, he was perchance to see no more.

Mrs. Colfax, yawning, had taken a book and gone to bed.  Still Virginia sat on the porch, while the frogs sang of rain, and the lightning quivered across the eastern sky.  She heard the crunch of wheels in the gravel.