“And—­Clarence?”

“His name is not there.”

“Thank God!” exclaimed Mrs. Colfax.  “Are the Yankees beaten?”

“Yes,” said Virginia, coldly.  “At what time shall I order the carriage to take you to Bellegarde?”

Mrs. Colfax leaned forward and caught the hem of her niece’s gown.  “Oh, let me stay,” she cried, “let me stay.  Clarence may be with them.”

Virginia looked down at her without pity.

“As you please, Aunt Lillian,” she answered.  “You know that you may always stay here.  I only beg of you one thing, that when you have anything to complain of, you will bring it to me, and not mention it before Pa.  He has enough to worry him.”

“Oh, Jinny,” sobbed the lady, in tears again, “how can you be so cruel at such a time, when my nerves are all in pieces?”

But she did not lift her voice at dinner, which was very poor indeed for Colonel Carvel’s house.  All day long Virginia, assisted by Uncle Ben and Aunt Easter, toiled in the stifling kitchen, preparing dainties which she had long denied herself.  At evening she went to the station at Fourteenth Street with her father, and stood amongst the people, pressed back by the soldiers, until the trains came in.  Alas, the heavy basket which the Colonel carried on his arm was brought home again.  The first hundred to arrive, ten hours in a hot car without food or water, were laid groaning on the bottom of great furniture vans, and carted to the new House of Refuge Hospital, two miles to the south of the city.

The next day many good women went there, Rebel and Union alike, to have their hearts wrung.  The new and cheap building standing in the hot sun reeked with white wash and paint.  The miserable men lay on the hard floor, still in the matted clothes they had worn in battle.  Those were the first days of the war, when the wages of our passions first came to appal us.  Many of the wounds had not been tended since they were dressed on the field weeks before.

Mrs. Colfax went too, with the Colonel and her niece, although she declared repeatedly that she could not go through with such an ordeal.  She spoke the truth, for Mr. Carvel had to assist her to the waiting-room.  Then he went back to the improvised wards to find Virginia busy over a gaunt Arkansan of Price’s army, whose pitiful, fever-glazed eyes were following her every motion.  His frontiersman’s clothes, stained with blackened blood, hung limp over his wasted body.  At Virginia’s bidding the Colonel ran downstairs for a bucket of fresh water, and she washed the caked dust from his face and hands.  It was Mr. Brinsmade who got the surgeon to dress the man’s wound, and to prescribe some of the broth from Virginia’s basket.  For the first time since the war began something of happiness entered her breast.

It was Mr. Brinsmade who was everywhere that day, answering the questions of distracted mothers and fathers and sisters who thronged the place; consulting with the surgeons; helping the few who knew how to work in placing mattresses under the worst cases; or again he might have been seen seated on the bare floor with a pad on his knee, taking down the names of dear ones in distant states,—­that he might spend his night writing to them.