"Captain Beardsley first called my attention to the fact that medicine had gone up in price, and I saw by a paper I got in Nassau that the rebels are already smuggling quinine across the Potomac," answered Marcy. "There's a good deal of ague about here, and we'd be in a pretty fix if we should all get down with it, and no medicine in the house to help us out." Here he got up and drew his chair closer to his mother's side, adding in a whisper, "I've twenty-one hundred dollars in gold in my valise, lacking what I paid for my railroad ticket, and nearly four hundred dollars of it belongs to me. The rest belongs to the captain of the _Hollins._" "Do you still cling to the hope that you will some day meet him again?" asked his mother. "I know it will be like hunting for a needle in a haystack, but if I don't find him I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that I tried to, and that I haven't spent any of his money. I'll keep it locked in my trunk until my arm gets so that I can handle a spade, and then I'll hide it in one of the flower beds. Now, how is everything about home? Has Kelsey shown his ugly face here since I went away, or have you heard anything from those 'secret enemies' that Wat Gifford spoke of? How has Hanson behaved himself?" Mrs. Gray's report was so satisfactory that Marcy was put quite at his ease. She had had nothing to worry over, she told him, except, of course, his absence and Jack's, and if she had not received so many warnings she would not have suspected that there were such things as secret enemies around her. But she had relaxed none of her vigilance, and was always on her guard when any of the neighbors came to see her. It was a dreadful way to live, but there was no help for it.