“I want to go home, Cousin Arthur,” she began. “I want to go home at once. I want my dear old mammy to put her arms around me as she used to do when I was a little child, and croon me to sleep, so that I may forget all that has happened to me. And, I want to talk with you again, Cousin Arthur, as freely as I used to do when you and I rode together through the woodlands or the corn at sunrise, when we didn’t mind a wetting from the dew, and when our horses and my dear dogs seemed to enjoy the glory of the morning as keenly as we did. It is in memory of those mornings that I send you back the soiled handkerchief you mailed to me. I want you, please, to give it to Ben, and tell him I make him a present of it, because it is no longer fit for you to use. You needn’t tell him anything more than that. He will understand. But I mustn’t leave you any longer to the mercy of such neglect on the part of servants to whom you are always so good. I must get home again before this terrible war breaks out. I have read all your letters about it a hundred times each, and I have tried to fit myself for my part in it. When you told me how great the need was likely to be for somebody qualified to make medicines, and salt, and saltpetre and soda and potash for gunpowder--no, you didn’t tell me of all that, you wrote to Edmonia about it, and that hurt my feelings because it seemed to put me out of your life and work--but when Edmonia told me what you had written about it, I set myself to work again at my chemistry, and I have worked so diligently at it that my master, Mons. X. declares that I am capable of taking complete charge of a laboratory and doing the most difficult and delicate of all the work needed. I believe I am. Anyhow, he has somehow found out,--though I certainly never told him of it--that you taught me at the beginning and he insists upon giving me a letter to you about my qualifications. “You say you hope Virginia will not secede, and that perhaps, after all, there will be no war. But I see clearly that you have no great confidence in your own hopes. So I am in a great hurry to get home before trouble comes. After it comes it may be too late for me to get home at all.