“He passed the house once, hesitated, and did not enter.  Papa, he has not changed, and you know it.  He has plainly asked for a gift only second to what I can give to God.  With a tenacity which nothing but his will can account for, perhaps, he seeks it still.  Do you think his distant manner deceives me for a moment?  Nor has my coldness any influence on him.  Yet it has not been the coldness of indifference, and he knows that too.  He has seen and felt, like sword-thrusts, my indignation, my contempt.  He has said to my face, ‘You think me a coward.’  He is no fool, and has fully comprehended the situation.  If he had virtually admitted, ’I am a coward, and therefore can have no place among the friends who are surpassing your ideal of manly heroism,’ and withdrawn to those to whom a million is more than all heroism, the affair would have ended naturally long ago.  But he persists in bringing me a daily sense of failure and humiliation.  He says:  ’My regard for you is so great I can’t give you up, yet not so great as to lead me to do what hundreds of thousands are doing.  I can’t face danger for your sake.’  I have tried to make the utmost allowance for his constitutional weakness, yet it has humiliated me that I had not the power to enable him to overcome so strange a failing.  Why, I could face death for you, and he can’t stand beside one whom he used to sneer at as ’little Strahan.’  Yet, such is his idea of my woman’s soul that he still gives me his thoughts and therefore his hopes;” and she almost stamped her foot in her irritation.

“Would you truly give your life for me?” he asked, gently.

“Yes, I know I could, and would were there necessity; not in callous disregard of danger, but because the greater emotion swallows up the less.  Faulty as I am, there would be no bargainings and prudent reservations in my love.  These are not the times for half-way people.  Oh think, papa, while we are here in the midst of every comfort, how many thousands of mutilated, horribly wounded men are dying in agony throughout the South!  My heart goes out to them in a sympathy and homage I can’t express.  Think how Lane and even Strahan may be suffering to-night, with so much done for them, and then remember the prisoners of war and the poor unknown enlisted men, often terribly neglected, I fear.  Papa, won’t you let me go as a nurse?  The ache would go out of my own heart if I tried to reduce this awful sum of anguish a little.  He whose word and touch always banished pain and disease would surely shield me in such labors.  As soon as danger no longer threatens you, won’t you let me do a little, although I am only a girl?”

“Yes, Marian,” her father replied, gravely; “far be it from me to repress such heaven-born impulses.  You are now attaining the highest rank reached by humanity.  All the avenues of earthly distinction cannot lead beyond the spirit of self-sacrifice for others.  This places you near the Divine Man, and all grow mean and plebeian to the degree that they recede from him.  You see what comes of developing your better nature.  Selfishness and its twin, cowardice, are crowded out.”