"Tell Captain Irby you can't wait any longer," replied Kincaid with a mock frown and gave Anna yet gayer attention a minute more. Then he walked beside his cousin toward the command, his horse close at his back. The group, by pairs, chose view points. Only Miss Valcour stayed in the carriage with the General, bent on effecting a change in his mind. In Mobile Flora had been easily first in any social set to which she condescended. In New Orleans, brought into the Callenders' circles by her cousin Mandeville, she had found herself quietly ranked second to Anna, and Anna now yet more pointedly outshining her through the brazen splendor of this patriotic gift of guns. For this reason and others yet to appear she had planned a strategy and begun a campaign, one of whose earliest manoeuvres must be to get Irby, not Kincaid, made their uncle's adjutant-general, and therefore to persuade the uncle that to give Kincaid the battery would endear him to Anna and so crown with victory the old man's perfectly obvious plan. Greenleaf left his horse tied and walked apart with Anna. This, he murmured, was the last time they would be together for years. "Yes," she replied with a disheartening composure, although from under the parasol with which he shaded her she met his eyes so kindly that his heart beat quicker. But before he could speak on she looked away to his fretting horse and then across to the battery, where a growing laugh was running through the whole undisciplined command. "What is it about?" she playfully inquired, but then saw. In response to the neigh of Greenleaf's steed Hilary's had paused an instant and turned his head, but now followed on again, while the laughter ended in the clapping of a hundred hands; for Kincaid's horse had the bridle free on his neck and was following his master as a dog follows. Irby scowled, the General set his jaws, and Hilary took his horse's bridle and led him on. "That's what _I_ want to do every time I look at him!" called Charlie to his sister. "Then look the other way!" carolled back the slender beauty. To whom Anna smiled across in her belated way, and wondered if the impulse to follow Hilary Kincaid ever came to women. But now out yonder the two cousins were in the saddle, Irby's sabre was out, and soon the manoeuvres were fully under way. Flora, at the General's side, missed nothing of them, yet her nimble eye kept her well aware that across here in this open seclusion the desperate Greenleaf's words to Anna were rarely explanatory of the drill. "And now," proclaimed Mandeville, "you'll see them form into line fazed to the rear!" And Flora, seeing and applauding, saw also Anna turn to her suitor a glance, half pity for him, half pleading for his pity. "I say unless--" Greenleaf persisted-- "There is no 'unless.' There can't ever be any." "But may I not at least say--?" "I'd so much rather you would not," she begged. "At present, you mean?"