In due time Strahan departed, hopeful and eager to enter on the duties pertaining to his higher rank.  He felt that Marian’s farewell had been more than she had ever given him any right to expect.  Her manner had ever been too frank and friendly to awaken delusive hopes, and, after all, his regard for her was characterized more by boyish adoration than by the deep passion of manhood.  To his sanguine spirit the excitement of camp and the responsibilities of his new position formed attractions which took all poignant regret from his leave-taking, and she was glad to recognize this truth.  She had failed signally to carry out her self-sacrificing impulse, when he was so ill, to reward his heroism and supplement his life with her own; and she was much relieved to find that he appeared satisfied with the friendship she gave, and that there was no need of giving more.  Indeed, he made it very clear that he was not a patriotic martyr in returning to the front, and his accounts of army life had shown that the semi-humorous journal, kept by himself and Blauvelt, was not altogether a generous effort to conceal from her a condition of dreary duty, hardship, and danger.  Life in the field has ever had its fascinations to the masculine nature, and her friends were apparently finding an average enjoyment equal to her own.  She liked them all the better for this, since, to her mind, it proved that that the knightly impulses of the past were unspent,—­that, latent in the breasts of those who had seemed mere society fellows, dwelt the old virile forces.

“I shall prove,” she assured herself, proudly, “that since true men are the same now as when they almost lived in armor, so ladies in their bowers have favors only for those to whom heroic action is second nature.”

Blauvelt had maintained the journal during Strahan’s absence, doing more with pencil than pen, and she had rewarded him abundantly by spicy little notes, full of cheer and appreciation.  She had no scruples in maintaining this correspondence, for in it she had her father’s sanction, and the letters were open to her parents’ inspection when they cared to see them.  Indeed, Mr. and Mrs. Vosburgh enjoyed the journal almost as much as Marian herself.

After Strahan’s departure, life was unusually quiet in the young girl’s home.  Her father was busy, as usual, and at times anxious, for he was surrounded by elements hostile to the government.  Aware, however, that the army of the Potomac was being largely reinforced, that General Hooker was reorganizing it with great success, and that he was infusing into it his own sanguine spirit, Mr. Vosburgh grew hopeful that, with more genial skies and firmer roads, a blow would be struck which would intimidate disloyalty at the North as well as in the South.

Marian shared in this hopefulness, although she dreaded to think how much this blow might cost her, as well as tens of thousands of other anxious hearts.