"She says Pauline did not read her letter through at all, but sprang up with tears in her eyes and merely said she must run up-stairs a few minutes. What do you suppose is wrong?" Of course I had no explanation to offer. Pauline did not return for an hour. When she again appeared she was very pale and quiet. Harrod meantime had taken a horse and ridden off to Sandbrook, where he wanted to reach the telegraph-office. It was late in the evening when he returned. I had been reading in the library for some time while the ladies were at the piano. He strode into the hall and stood at the parlor-door. "Pauline, did the major tell you in his letter?" he asked. "Tell me what?" she inquired, with quickly rising color. "That their orders had come?" She hesitated and made no reply. Quickly he stepped forward and threw his arm around her, tenderly kissing her forehead. "You'll make a soldier's wife, Pauline. You can keep a secret." And now, looking quickly at Miss Kitty, I saw that she had risen and was eagerly gazing at them, a strange, wistful light in her sweet young face. "What is it all, colonel?" I inquired. "The cavalry left for New Orleans at dark. Amory got telegraphic orders soon after we left, and Vinton came in from the West by the evening train and took command at the station. Neither of them had time to come out here to say good-by," he added, with an involuntary glance at Kitty, while still holding Pauline's hand in his own. "You saw Major Vinton?" Pauline calmly asked. "Yes, dear. I have a note for you. He was only there thirty minutes. Amory had the troop, horses and all, on the cars before the Memphis train got in." She took her note and with him walked into the library. Irresolutely I stepped out on the gallery a moment. Then returning for a cigar or something consolatory, I nearly collided with Miss Kitty at the parlor-door. She recoiled a pace; then with her bonny head bowed in her hands, with great sobs shaking her slender form, my unheroic little heroine rushed past me and up the stairs to her own room. I felt like a spy. CHAPTER VII. The next few days passed somewhat gloomily. Eager interest centred in the daily paper from New Orleans. The _Times_ in those days was "run" entirely in the interest of a strong faction not inaptly termed "carpet-baggers." Few of the Republican party of the white element had been natives and property-owners in the State before the war. All of the colored race, most of them at least, had been residents perhaps, but held as property rather than as property-owners. The _Picayune_, always the representative of the old _régime_ in the South, was naturally the journal which found its way into our distant household. Its pictures of affairs in the Crescent City were startling beyond question, and its columns were filled with grave portent of riot, insurrection, and bloodshed.