A shattered crew we were when in the forenoon of the third day we reached our goal. Harry\'s hand was giving him less trouble, but both my small wounds were misbehaving as stoutly as their limitations would allow; my aches were cruel and incessant, my side was swollen and my shoulder hot. Miss Harper was "really ill," said the surgeon, but for whose coming with us we should hardly have brought our whole number through alive. Both Ferry and Charlotte were in a critical condition. "Take you in!" said our tearfully smiling Mrs. Wall; "why, we\'d take yo\' whole crowd in ef we had to go out and bunk undeh the trees owse\'v\'s!... Oh, Mr. Smith, you po\' chi--ild!... Oh, my Lawd! is this Lieutenant Do-wrong! Good Lawd, good Lawd! I think this waugh\'s gone on now jess long enough!"

In the house she gave the younger Harpers a second kiss all round. "You po\' dears, yo\'re hero-ines, now, and hencefo\'th fo\'evehmo\'!" Harry and I agreed they were; it was one of the few points on which we thought alike. We even agreed that Estelle\'s grasp of earthly realities was not so feeble as we had thought it.

"Fact is," I said to him, on our first day at the Walls\', as he was leaving the soldiers\' room, where I sat under the surgeon\'s inspection, "you were totally mistaken about her."

"Yes, I was," he replied; "she\'s got more sense in a minute than Camille\'s got in a week," and shut the door between us.

My blood leaped with rage, yet I sat perfectly calm, while the surgeon laughed like a hyena. "As soon as you can let me go, Doctor," I frigidly said, "I shall look up the Lieutenant. I consider that remark ungentlemanly, and his method of making it as worthy only of a coward."

The surgeon cackled again. "If that man," I dispassionately resumed, "was not perfectly sure that I am too honorable a gentleman to give Miss Camille the faintest hint of what he has said, sooner than say it he would go out and cut his throat from ear to ear."

"Well! you oughtn\'t to get mad at him for thinking you a gentleman."

"He sha\'n\'t take a low advantage of my being one. You think he\'s open and blunt--he\'s as sly as a mink. He praises the older sister at the younger\'s expense, when it\'s the younger one that he\'s so everlastingly stuck on that he can\'t behave like a gentleman to any man to whom she shows the slightest preference." We heard a coming step, but I talked on: "Sense! poor simpleton! he knows he hasn\'t got"--the door opened and Harry stepped partly in, but I only raised my voice,--"hasn\'t got as much brains in his whole head as there is in one of her tracks."

With something between a sob, a sputter and a shriek he shut himself out again. Harry was never deep but in a shallow way, and never shallow without a certain treacherous depth. When Ned Ferry the next day summoned me to his bedside I went with a choking throat, not doubting I was to give account of this matter,--until I saw the kindness of his pallid face. Then my silly heart rose as much too high as it had just been too low and I thought "Charlotte has surrendered!" All he wanted was to make me his scribe. But when we were done he softly asked, "That business of yours we talked about on the Plank-road--it looks any better?"

I bit my lip, turned away and shook my head. "Well, anyhow," he said, "I am told there is nobody in your way."

I faced him sharply--"Who told you that?" and felt sure he would name the tricky aide-de-camp. But he pointed to the room overhead, which again, as in the other house, was Charlotte\'s. I blushed consciously with gratitude. "Well," I said, "it makes me happy to see you beginning again to get well."

Within the same hour I met unexpectedly two other persons. First, Harry Helm; who, before I could speak, was deluging me with words, telling me for the twentieth time how, on that evening of the indoor fight, coming with a platoon of Mississippians which he had procured merely as a guard, he was within a hundred yards of the house before our shots in the bedroom told him he was riding to a rescue. Then suddenly he began to assure me that in what he had said about the two sisters he had sought only to mislead the surgeon, who, he declared, was more utterly de............