“I suppose he was; but Flagg comes next—­according to his own report.  Why, Tom, if your cousin had been in all the battles he says he has, the man would have been killed ten times over.  He’d have had at least an arm or a leg shot off.”

That Washington Flagg had all his limbs on was actually becoming a grievance to Mrs. Wesley.

The situation filled me with anxiety.  Between my cousin’s deplorable attitude and my wife’s justifiable irritation, I was extremely perplexed.  If I had had a dozen cousins, the solution of the difficulty would have been simple.  But to close our door on our only kinsman was an intolerable alternative.

If any word of mine has caused the impression that Clara was not gentle and sympathetic and altogether feminine, I have wronged her.  The reserve which strangers mistook for coldness was a shell that melted at the slightest kind touch, her masterful air the merest seeming.  But whatever latent antagonism lay in her nature the colonel had the faculty of bringing to the surface.  It must be conceded that the circumstances in which she was placed were trying, and Clara was without that strong, perhaps abnormal, sense of relationship which sustained me in the ordeal.  Later on, when matters grew more complicated, I could but admire her resignation—­if it were not helpless despair.  Sometimes, indeed, she was unable to obliterate herself, and not only stood by her guns, but carried the war into the enemy’s country.  I very frequently found myself between two fires, and was glad to drag what small fragments were left of me from the scene of action.  In brief, the little house in Clinton Place was rapidly transforming itself into a ghastly caricature of home.

Up to the present state of affairs the colonel had never once failed to appear at dinner-time.  We had become so accustomed to his ring at the prescribed hour, and to hearing him outside in the hall softly humming The Bonny Blue Flag, or I wish I was in Dixie’s Land (a wish which he did not wholly monopolize)—­we had, I repeat, become so accustomed to these details that one night when he absented himself we experienced a kind of alarm.  It was not until the clock struck ten that we gave over expecting him.  Then, fearing that possibly he was ill, I put on my hat and stepped round to Macdougal Street.  Mr. Flagg had gone out late in the afternoon, and had not returned.  No, he had left no word in case any one called.  What had happened?  I smile to myself now, and I have smiled a great many times, at the remembrance of how worried I was that night as I walked slowly back to Clinton Place.