But the junior warden did not; his understanding was that there was more to tell. He drew up his chair again. "Sara Carroll, sir, is a remarkable girl." (The rector again resigned himself.) "She is, as I may say, one-ideaed. By that I mean that she has had from childhood one feeling so predominant that she has fairly seemed to have but the one, which is her devotion to her father. She had scarcely been separated from him (save, as it happens, during the very summer when he met and married the present Madam Carroll) until she was a tall girl of thirteen. This was in 1861. At that time, before the beginning of actual hostilities, her uncle, John Chase--he had married her mother's sister--offered to take her and have her educated with his own daughter Euphemia during the continuance of the troubled times. For John Chase had always been very fond of the little Sara; he fancied that she was like his wife. And, cold New-Englander though he was, he had worshipped his wife (she was Juliet Witherspoon-Meredith), and seemed to be always thinking of her, though she had been dead many years. The Major at first refused. But Madam Carroll, with her exquisite perception, perfect judgment, and beautiful goodness" (the junior warden always spoke in at least triplets of admiration when he mentioned the Major's wife), "explained to him the benefit it would be to Sara. Her own lot was cast with his; she would not have it otherwise; but in the wandering life she expected to lead, following his fortunes through the armed South, what advantages in the way of education should she be able to secure for his little daughter, who was now of an age to need them? Whereas her uncle, who was very fond of her, would give her many. The Major at last yielded. And then Sara was told. Well as they knew her, I think they were both alarmed at the intensity of her grief. But when the poor child saw how it was distressing her father, she controlled it, or rather the expression of it; and to me her self-control was more touching even than her tears had been, for one could see that her innocent heart was breaking. The parting was a most pathetic sight--her white cheeks, silence, and loving, despairing eyes, that never left her father's face--I don't know when I have been more affected. For I speak from personal remembrance, sir: _I_ was _there_. Well, that little girl did not see her father again for four long years. She lived during that time with her uncle at Longfields--one of those villages of New England with still, elm-shaded, conscientious streets, silent white houses, the green blinds all closed across their broad fronts, yet the whole pervaded too, in spite of this quietude, by an atmosphere of general, unresting _interrogativeness_, which is, as I may say, sir, _strangling_ to the unaccustomed throat. I speak from personal remembrance; I have been _personally_ there."