With a frown of impatience, the matron who had been deputed to ask help from Rose, took the fifty cents, and with feelings anything but complimentary to the silly little lady, went back to the hall where scores of women were busily employed in behalf of the company, some of whom would never return to tell how much good even the homely housewife, with its pins and needles, and thread, had done them when far away where no mother or sister hand could reach them, nor yet how the thought that perhaps a dear one’s fingers had torn the soft linen band, or scraped the tender lint applied to some gaping wound, had helped to ease the pain, and cheer the homesick heart. It was surely a work of mercy in which our noble women were then engaged, and if from the group collected in Rockland Hall, there was much loud murmuring at Rose Mather’s want of sense or heart, it arose not so much from ill-nature, as from astonishment that she could be so callous and indifferent to an object of so much importance. “Wait till her husband goes, and she won’t mince along so daintily, taking all that pains to show her Balmoral, when it isn’t one bit muddy,” muttered the Widow Simms, pointing out, to those near the window, the lady in question, tripping down the street in quest of lavender kids, perhaps, or more likely, bound for her husband’s office, where, now that everybody worked all day long at the Hall, she spent much of her time, it was so lonely at home, with nobody to call. “I hope he’ll be drafted and have to go, upon my word!” continued the widow, whose heart was very sore with thinking of the three seats at her fireside, so soon to be vacated by her darling boys, Eli, John, and Isaac. “Yes, I do hope he’ll be drafted, don’t you, Mrs. Graham?” and she turned toward Annie, who was rolling up bandages of linen, and weaving in with every coil a prayer that the poor soldier, whose lot it should be to need that band, might return again to the loved ones at home, or else be fitted for that better home, where war is unknown.