It was so pretty, the silvery way the questioning pair laughed to each other--at his simile, if that was the genuine source of their amusement--that he let himself laugh with them. "But how?" they further asked. "He had left good-by? Good-day, yes! But for what good-by when juz' returning?" "Ah, because here to them, also, it must be good-by, and be as brief as there! The battery--he had sent word to them at sunrise, but had just learned that his messenger had missed them--the battery was at last ordered"--etc. "_Mon Dieu!_" gasped the old lady as if this was too cruelly sudden, and, "Oh, my brother! Oh, Captain Kincaid!" beautifully sighed Flora, from whom the grandmother had heard the news hours before. Yet, "Of course _any_ time 'twould have to be sudden," they had presently so recovered as to say, and Flora, for both, spoke on in accents of loveliest renunciation. She easily got the promise she craved, that no ill should come to Charlie which a commander's care could avert. The loss of their Mobile home, which also Madame had perfectly known since morning, was broken to them with less infelicity, though they would talk cheerily of the house as something which no evil ever would or could befall, until suddenly the girl said, "Grandma, dearest, that night air is not so pretty good for your rheum; we better pass inside," and the old lady, insistently unselfish, moved a step within, leaving the other two on the balcony. There, when the blow came at last, Flora's melodious grievings were soon over, and her sweet reasonableness, her tender exculpation not alone of this dear friend but even of the silly fellows who had done the deed, and her queenly, patriotic self-obliteration, were more admirable than can be described. Were, as one may say, good literature. The grateful soldier felt shamed to find, most unaccountably, that Anna's positively cruel reception of the same news somehow suited him better. It was nearer his own size, he said to himself. At any rate the foremost need now, on every account, was to be gone. But as he rose Flora reminded him of "those few hundred gold?" Goodness! he had clean forgotten the thing. He apologized for the liberty taken in leaving it with her, but--"Oh!" she prettily interrupted, "when I was made so proud!" Well, now he would relieve her and take it at once to a bank cashier who had consented to receive it at his house this very night. She assured him its custody had given her no anxiety, for she had promptly passed it over to another! He was privately amazed: "Oh--o-oh--oh, yes, certainly. That was right! To whom had she--?"