CHAPTER XXII THE WOUNDED SOLDIER. Widow Simms was going to the army, and Jimmie Carleton, who was coming home for a few weeks, was to be her escort to Washington. During the summer Jimmie had seen a good deal of hard service. He had been in no general battle, but had taken part in several skirmishes and raids, in one of which he received a severe flesh wound in his arm, which, together with a sprained ankle, confined him for a time to the hospital, and finally procured for him a furlough of three or four weeks. Rose was delighted, and this time the Federal Fag was actually floating from the cupola of the Mather mansion in honor of Jimmie’s return but there was no crowd at the depot to welcome him. That custom was worn out, and only the Mather carriage was waiting for Jimmie, whose right arm was in a sling, and whose face looked pale and thin from his recent confinement in hospital. Altogether he was very interesting in his character as a wounded soldier, Rose thought, as she made an impetuous rush at him, nearly strangling him with her vehement joy at having him home again. And Jimmie was very glad to see her,—glad, too, to meet his mother,—but his eyes kept constantly watching the door, and wandering down the hall, as if in quest of some one who did not come. During the weary days he had passed in the Georgetown Hospital, Annie Graham’s face had been constantly with him, and as he watched the tall, wiry figure of the nurse, who always wore a sun-bonnet and had a pin between her teeth, he kept wishing that it was Annie, and even worked himself into a passion against his sister Rose, who, in one of her letters, had spoken of Annie’s proposal to offer herself as nurse, and her violent opposition to the plan. “If Rose had minded her business Annie might possibly have been in this very ward, instead of that old maid from Massachusetts, who looks for all the world like those awful good women in Boston, who don’t wear hoops, and who distribute tracts on Sundays in the vicinity of Cornhill. Why can’t a woman look decent, and distribute tracts, too? Annie, in her black dress, with her hair done up somehow, would do more good to us poor invalids than forty strong-minded females in paste-board bonnets, with an everlasting pin between their teeth.”