“‘Sweat and suffer stripes’! Bloody sweat, father thinks it will be,--he is so sure that it will end in war. Will it come in our time? Oh, surely, things cannot go on like this much longer! So much anger on both sides, so much indignation in the North, so many threats in the South--and all getting worse and worse every year--Oh, if war is to be the end, we must be getting nearly there! War!” She shivered and pressed her hands against her face. As the grisly specter of blood and smoke passed vaguely before her mind’s eye her anxious thoughts hovered with instant anxiety over the dear image of him who she knew would be among the first to challenge the issue. Then with a little cry she sprang to her feet. “Shall I never remember I must not think of him like that!” she asked herself with bitterness. “My sister’s husband! O, God, help me to forget!” She paced about the room with frowning brows and lips pressed hard together, telling herself, as she had already done a hundred times, that she must learn to forget, as it had been so easy for him to do. And there she touched upon her deepest wound, that his love had not been as fine and as true as she had thought it. “How could he love another--so different--and wish to marry her, after all that has passed between us? I could not--how could he?” was the question that would come back, again and again. She tried to subdue it by telling herself that since he could, since his love and faith were not equal to hers, he was not worthy of her love and deserved only forgetfulness complete, eternal. But her heart cried out fiercely against this edict of her brain and clung to its need of believing in him. “He is fine and noble in many, many ways,” at last she said to herself, “in nearly all ways the finest and the noblest man I’ve ever known, and if his love fell short of all I thought it was, I must try to forgive him that, as I forgive him his blindness about the wickedness of slavery, which kept us apart, and, I suppose--deep down in my heart--I suppose--I’ll always love him. But I’ll try, oh, I’ll try from this minute, always to think of him as Charlotte’s husband. He mustn’t be Jeff to me any more--just Charlotte’s husband! Charlotte’s husband!” During her days in jail she spent much time embroidering dainty things for Charlotte’s trousseau, and into these she found herself able to stitch, along with the tears that would fall now and then, prayers and hopes for Charlotte’s happiness and earnest desires, since the marriage must be, that she would make her husband happy. But on this latter question she found herself haunted by a doubt that would yield to no arguments based on the sequence of love and happiness.