September was in its first week. The news of Vicksburg--and Port Hudson--ah, yes, and Gettysburg!--was sixty days old.

From Southern Mississippi and East Louisiana all the grays who marched under the slanting bayonet or beside the cannon's wheel were gone. Left were only the "citizen" with his family and slaves, the post quartermaster and commissary, the conscript-officer, the trading Jew, the tax-in-kind collector, the hiding deserter, the jayhawker, a few wounded boys on furlough, and Harper's cavalry. Throughout the Delta and widely about its grief-broken, discrowned, beggared, shame-crazed, brow-beaten Crescent City the giddying heat quaked visibly over the high corn, cotton, and cane, up and down the broken levees and ruined highways, empty by-ways, and grass-grown railways, on charred bridges, felled groves, and long burnt fence lines. The deep, moss-draped, vine-tangled swamps were dry.

So quivered the same heat in the city's empty thoroughfares. Flowers rioted in the unkept gardens. The cicada's frying note fried hotter than ever. Dazzling thunder-heads towered in the upper blue and stood like snow mountains of a vaster world. The very snake coiled in the shade. The spiced air gathered no freshness from the furious, infrequent showers, the pavements burned the feet, and the blue "Yank" (whom there no one dared call so by word or look), so stoutly clad, so uncouthly misfitted, slept at noon face downward in the high grass under the trees of the public squares preempted by his tents, or with piece loaded and bayonet fixed slowly paced to and fro in the scant shade of some confiscated office-building, from whose upper windows gray captives looked down, one of them being "the ladies' man."

Not known of his keepers by that name, though as the famous Major Kincaid of Kincaid's Battery (the latter at Mobile with new guns), all July and August he had been of those who looked down from such windows; looked down often and long, yet never descried one rippling fold of one gossamer flounce of a single specimen of those far-compassionated "ladies of New Orleans," one of whom, all that same time, was Anna Callender. No proved spy, she, no incarcerated prisoner, yet the most gravely warned, though gentlest, suspect in all the recalcitrant city.

Neither in those sixty days had Anna seen him. The blue sentries let no one pass in sight of that sort of windows. "Permit?" She had not sought it, Some one in gold lace called her "blamed lucky" to enjoy the ordinary permissions accorded Tom, Dick, and Harry. Indeed Tom, Dick, and Harry were freer than she. By reason of hints caught from her in wanderings of her mind on the boat, in dreams of a great service to be done for Dixie, the one spot where she most yearned to go and to be was forbidden her, and not yet had she been allowed to rest her hungry eyes on Callender House. Worse than idle, therefore, perilous for both of them and for any dream of great service, would it have been even to name the name of Hilary Kincaid.

What torture the double ban, the two interlocked privations! Yonder a city, little sister of New Orleans, still mutely hoping to be saved, here Hilary alive again, though Anna still unwitting whether she should love and live or doubt and die. Yet what would they say when they should meet? How could either explain? Surely, we think, love would have found a way; but while beyond each other's sight and hearing, no way could Hilary, at least, descry.

To him it seemed impossible to speak to her--even to Fred Greenleaf had Fred been there!--without betraying another maiden, one who had sealed his lips forever by confessing a heart which had as much--had more right to love than he to live. True, Anna, above all, had right to live, to love, to know; but in simplest honor to commonest manhood, in simplest manhood's honor to all womankind, to Flora, to Anna herself, this knowledge should come from any other human tongue rather than from his. From Anna he needed no explanation. That most mysteriously she should twice have defaulted as keeper of sacred treasure; that she stood long accused, by those who would most gladly have scouted the charge, of leanings to another suitor, a suitor in the blue, and of sympathies, nay, services, treasonous to the ragged standards of the gray; that he had himself found her in the enemy's lines, carried there by her own steps, and accepting captivity without a murmur, ah, what were such light-as-air trials of true love's faith while she was still Anna Callender, that Anna from whom one breath saying, "I am true," would outweigh all a world could show or surmise in accusation?

And Anna: What could she say after what she had seen? Could she tell him--with Flora, as it were, still in his arms--could she explain that she had been seeking him to cast herself there? Or if she stood mute until he should speak, what could he say to count one heart-throb against what she had seen? Oh, before God! before God! it was not jealousy that could make her dumb or deaf to either of them. She confessed its pangs. Yes! yes! against both of them, when she remembered certain things or forgot this and that, it raged in her heart, tingled in the farthest reach of her starved and fever-dried veins. Yet to God himself, to whom alone she told it, to God himself she protested on her knees it did not, should not, could not rule her. What right had she to give it room? Had she not discerned from the beginning that those two were each other's by natural destiny? Was it not well, was it not God-sent to all three, that in due time, before too late, he and she--that other, resplendent she--should be tried upon each other alone--together? Always hitherto she, Anna, had in some way, some degree, intervened, by some chance been thrust and held between them; but at length nature, destiny, had all but prevailed, when once more she--stubbornly astray from that far mission of a city's rescue so plainly hers--had crashed in between to the shame and woe of all, to the gain of no cause, no soul, no sweet influence in all love's universe. Now, meeting Hilary, what might she do or say?

One thing! Bid him, on exchange or escape--if Heaven should grant the latter--find again Flora, and in her companionship, at last unhindered, choose! Yes, that would be justice and wisdom, mercy and true love, all in one. But could she do it, say it? She sprang up in bed to answer, "No-o-o!" no, she was no bloodless fool, she was a woman! Oh, God of mercy and true love, no! For reasons invincible, no! but most of all for one reason, one doubt, vile jealousy's cure and despair's antidote, slow to take form but growing as her strength revived, clear at last and all-sufficing; a doubt infinitely easier, simpler, kinder, and more blessed than to doubt true love. Nay, no doubt, but a belief! the rational, life-restoring belief, that in that awful hour of twilight between the hosts, of twilight and delirium, what she had seemed to see she had but seemed to see. Not all, ah, no, not all! Hilary ............