“Yes, you were well disguised! wonderfully well! You had sacrificed your luxuriant and beautiful, dark brown tresses, and had put on a skull-cap wig of short, stiff, bristling flaxen hair, and drawn it tight and low over your forehead, making the latter much narrower than nature had formed it. You had shaved off your arched black eyebrows, giving your face the bald look corresponding to the short, stiff hair, and quite altering the expression of your eyes. You had widened your mouth by two deep hidden lines in the corner. Altogether you had made, as you women say, ‘a figure of yourself,’ which was not Britomarte. You had put yourself in the uniform of a United States soldier. And you always carried four or five pebbles in your mouth, to make you speak thickly like a German,” said Justin. “And yet you recognized me?” “Yes; when I saw you in the ranks—flaxen hair, bald face, wide mouth, soldier’s clothes and Dutchman’s voice to the contrary notwithstanding—in the ugly, awkward little raw recruit, to my unbounded amazement I recognized my beautiful Britomarte Conyers,” he answered, smiling. Many times in her military career had Britomarte’s cheeks crimsoned for her own wounded womanhood; but never so deeply as now. “Oh, Justin, Justin!” she said, covering her face with her hands, and forgetting that he could not plainly see it in that obscure light—“Oh, Justin, it was for your sake, my dearest, that I transformed and disfigured myself so.” “I know it, dear Britomarte, I know it.” “Division from your side was worse than death to me—worse than division of soul from body. I felt that I _must_ be with you, at all costs, but I thought that you would never find me out. I wished to serve you as a faithful little brother, with my identity unsuspected. Oh, Justin, Justin! you never misunderstood or wronged me in your thoughts after you recognized me, I know!” she passionately exclaimed. “I never did.” “Had I known that you had discovered me, I would have vanished from your sight!” “I know it, dear Britomarte, I know it! for I know you. There is not, Britomarte, in the universe a creature who understands and appreciates you and your motives so truly and justly as I can and as I do.” “I feel sure of that,” murmured Britomarte. Justin pressed her hand and relapsed into silence. He was really very faint and weak from excessive loss of blood; and the transient strength lent him by excitement was beginning to fail. Britomarte took from her pocket some pieces of hard biscuit, soaked them in the brandy from her flask and put them bit by bit into his mouth. When he was sufficiently revived by these refreshments, she inquired: “Dear Justin, when you recognized me in the ranks, how was it that you did not whisper private information of the fact and get me quietly mustered out?”