When Elfie got back to the parsonage she found Erminie waiting for her in the library, where the dinner table for two had been set. At Elfie’s age girls can eat a hearty luncheon and immediately afterwards eat a hearty dinner, and suffer no inconvenience from indigestion either. So Elfie sat down to the table and opened her napkin. “How is Mr. Mim?” kindly inquired Erminie. “Poor fellow! I do believe but for his strict temperance habits, that blow would have killed him. As it is, he is getting well fast, just as you told me. His head is weak yet, though. And I took care not to excite him. I didn’t breathe a word to him of my adventures among the guerrillas. I allowed him to take it for granted that I had been sent home under a flag of truce.” “And he knows nothing of your forced marriage?” “Not a word.” “Nor of the battle with the guerrillas?” “No.” “But I should think he would see that in the newspapers.” “They don’t allow him to look at one in the present state of his health. But, Erminie, tell me about your protégés in the hospitals.” “Nearly all my boys are doing very well, Elfie. Two of them only, will die. One has his mother with him, and if mother and son were not both such earnest Christians it would half break my heart to see them, for she is an old woman and he is her youngest son and only surviving child. The other boy is far from every friend he has in the world, and so he is my own peculiar charge. He too is a child of God, and will meet death as serenely as if he were eighty years old instead of eighteen. Just as I left the hospital they told me that a train of ambulances had arrived, bringing in a large number of wounded from some recent battle-field. So we shall have a plenty of work on our hands, Elfie. I have four hampers of lint sent me from the North. And directly after dinner we shall have to take a carriage and carry it to the hospitals. It must be wanted now.” “Oh, Heaven help us, Erminie! We not only ‘sup full of horrors,’ but it seems to me we rise, breakfast, dine, sup and sleep full of horrors, in these war times. I don’t know how you _can_ stand it, Erminie. Has it hardened or strengthened you?” “Strengthened me, I hope, dearest,” answered Miss Rosenthal, as she arose from the table. Bob was despatched to the livery stable where Erminie kept her little carriage and horse, And Catherine was sent up into the attic to the linen room to fetch down the hampers of lint. And so, when Erminie and Elfie came down ready dressed to go out, they found the carriage at the door and the hampers stowed within it, and old Bob on the coachman’s box. “Drive to the hospital, Robert,” said Miss Rosenthal. And the horse started. A drive of some twenty minutes brought them to the front of the extensive buildings. “I declare, it looks like a funeral here,” said Elfie, noticing the crowd of ambulances that were drawn up before the hospital.