The girl had completely lost her mannerisms of speech in a very brief while, a fact which Dorothy attributed to her rare gift of imitation. Only once in a great while, when she was under excitement, did she lapse into the peculiarities either of pronunciation or of construction which had at first been so marked a characteristic of her utterance. She read voraciously now, reading always, apparently, with minute attention to language in her eager desire to learn. Her time for reading was practically made time. That is to say, it consisted chiefly of brief intervals between occupations. She was up every morning at five o’clock, in order that she might go to the stables and personally see to it that the horses and mules were properly fed and curried. “The negroes neglect them shamefully when I am not there in Cousin Arthur’s place,” she said, “and it is cruel to neglect poor dumb beasts that cannot provide for themselves or even utter a complaint.” As soon after seven as Dorothy’s nursery duties permitted, the two mounted their horses and rode away for a half-intoxicating draught of the air of a Virginia summer morning. Returning to a nine o’clock “breakfast of rags,” as Dorothy called the scant, makeshift meal that alone was possible to them in that time of stress, Evelyn went at once to the laboratory. After setting matters going there, she mounted again and rode away to the camp of the wounded soldiers to whose needs she ministered with a skill and circumspection that had been born of her peculiar experience in remote places. “The best medicine she brings us,” said one of the wounded men, one day, “is her laugh.” And yet Evelyn rarely laughed at all. It was her ever present smile and the general joyousness of her countenance that the invalids interpreted as laughter. She always carried a light shot-gun with her, and she rarely returned to the “gre’t house” without three or four squirrels for her own and Dorothy’s dinner. Now and then she filled her bag with partridges—or “quails,” as those most toothsome of game birds are generally, and quite improperly, called at the North. When September came, she got an occasional wild turkey also, her skill both in finding game and in the use of her gun being unusually good. One day Dorothy challenged her on this point. “You are a sentimentalist on the subject of animals,” she said, “and yet you are a huntswoman.” “But why not?” asked Evelyn, in astonishment at the implied question. “In the summer, the wild creatures multiply enormously. When the winter comes, they starve to death because there is not food enough. In the fall, the woods are full of them; in the spring, there are very few. Nine tenths of them must die in any case, and if my gun hastens the death of one, it betters the chance of another to survive. I could never deceive them, or persuade them to trust me and then betray their trust. I don’t think I am a sentimentalist, Dorothy, and—”