And how sad to find there was a victim, after all, when poor, threadbare old Doctor Visionary, inventor of the machine-gun and a new kind of powder, began to be missed by his landlady, there being, in Captain Kincaid's absence, no one else to miss him. Yes, it was the Captain who had got him a corner to work in at the powder-mill. So much the worse for both. Now plans, models, formulae, and inventor were gone in that one flash and roar that shook the whole city and stopped all talk of Captain Kincaid's promotion as an earthquake stops a clock. "Well," cried Constance to Flora, who had grown silent, "the battery will love him all the more!" "And so will we all!" said Madame, also to Flora; and Flora, throwing off a look of pain, explained to Anna, "He is so good to my brother!" "Naturally," quizzed Miranda, with her merriest wrinkles. Flora sparkled, made a pretty face at her and forced a change of theme; gave Anna's roses new praise, and said she had been telling grandma of the swarms of them in the rear garden. So the old lady, whom she had told no such thing, let Constance and Miranda conduct her there. But Flora softly detained Anna, and the moment they were alone seized both her hands. Whereat through all Anna's frame ran despair, crying, "He has asked her! He has asked her!" XIX FLORA ROMANCES "Dearest," warily exclaimed the Creole beauty, with a sudden excess of her pretty accent, "I am in a situation perfectly dreadful!" Anna drew her to a sofa, seeing pictures of her and Hilary together, and tortured with a belief in their exquisite fitness to be so. "Can I help you, dear?" she asked, though the question echoed mockingly within her. "Ah, no, except with advice," said Flora, "only with advice!" "Ho-o-oh! if I were worthy to advise you it wouldn't flatter me so to be asked." "But I muz' ask. 'Tis only with you that I know my secret will be--to everybody--and forever--at the bed of the ocean. You can anyhow promise me that." "Yes, I can anyhow promise you that." "Then," said Flora, "let me speak whiles--" She dropped her face into her hands, lifted it again and stared into her listener's eyes so piteously that through Anna ran another cry--"He has not asked! No girl alive could look so if he had asked her!" Flora seemed to nerve herself: "Anna, every dollar we had, every picayune we could raise, grandma and I, even on our Mobile house and our few best jewels, is--is--" "Oh, what--what? Not lost? Not--not stolen?" "Blown up! Blown up with that poor old man in the powder-mill!" "Flora, Flora!" was all Anna, in the shame of her rebuked conjectures, could cry, and all she might have cried had she known the very truth: That every dollar, picayune, and other resource had disappeared _gradually_ in the grist-mill of daily need and indulgence, and never one of them been near the powder-mill, the poor old man or any of his devices. "His theories were so convincing," sighed Flora.