So day after day found her in that comfortless dwelling, while the frequent callers at the Mather mansion wondered where she could be. It came out at last that she was nursing William Baker, lying dangerously sick of typhus fever in his mother’s dilapidated home, and then, as villagers will, the Rockland people wondered and gossiped, and wondered again how the aristocratic Rose Mather could sit hour after hour, in that poverty-stricken cottage, ministering to the wants of despised Bill Baker. Rose hardly knew, herself, and when questioned upon the subject could only reply— “I guess it’s because he’s a soldier, and I must do something for the war. Will knows it. He says I’m doing right, and Annie Graham, too.” And so, with her heart kept brave by thinking that Will and Annie approved her course, Rose went every day to Mrs. Baker’s, doing more by her cheerful presence and the needful comforts she supplied to arrest the progress of the disease and effect a favorable change, than all the physicians in the county could have done. Bill owed his life to her, and it was touching to witness his childish gratitude when reason resumed her throne, and he learned who it was he had sometimes called his “little Rebel,” and again had fancied was some beautiful angel sent to cure and comfort him. He had often seen Mrs. Mather in the streets before he went away; but never as closely as now, and for hours after his convalescence he would lie looking into her face, which seemed to puzzle him greatly. Occasionally, too, he would take from his pocket a picture, which he evidently compared with something about her person, then, with a sly wink, which began to be very annoying, he would return it to its hiding-place, and ask her sundry questions, which, under ordinary circumstances, she would have resented as being too familiar. At last, one afternoon, as she was sitting by him, while his mother did some errands in the village, he suddenly surprised her by dropping upon her lap an elegant gold watch, which Rose knew at a glance must have belonged to some person of taste and wealth. “What is it? Whose is it?” she asked, and Bill replied: “’Twas his’n, the chap’s I took, you know. He’s down to the old Capitol now, shet up. Didn’t you never hear of him?” “You mean the young man you captured,” Rose replied. “Tell me about him, please. Who was he, and where was his home?” “You tell,” Bill answered, with one of his peculiar winks. “He gave it as _John Brown_; but a chap who knowd him said ’twas somethin’ else. He wan’t a Rebel neither—that is, it wan’t his nater, for he came from Yankee land.” “A _traitor_, then,” Rose suggested, and Bill replied: “You needn’t guess agin; and you and I or’to be glad that no such _truck_ belongs to us.”