Still he had no suspicion that the woman beside him was the girl he had left on the beach at New London, and he continued: “Yes, Annie, I did, as boys of seventeen love girls of fourteen. She was pretty and soft, and pure and good, and I kissed her once on her forehead, and then I went away and never saw her after, or knew what became of her. And I am telling you this by way of confessing my misdeeds, for I’ve been a fast and reckless young man. I’ve gambled, and sneered at the Bible, and broken the Sabbath heaps of times, and flirted with more than forty girls, some of them not very respectable either, and none as pure as little Lulu. I ran away from home and nearly broke my mother’s heart. I joined the rebel army and fought against my brother at the battle of Bull Run. I was captured by Bill Baker and led with a halter to Washington and there shut up in prison. A fine character I give myself, and yet after all this I have dared to love you, Annie Graham, and I have brought you this way to ask if you will be my wife. Not now, of course: not before I go back; but if I come through the war alive will you be mine then, Annie? Tell me, darling, and don’t tremble so, or turn your face away.” Annie was shaking in every joint, and the face which Jimmie tried in vain to see was white as ashes. She had expected something like this when he led her down that grassy lane, but nevertheless it came to her with a shock, making her feel as if in some way she had injured her dead husband by listening to another’s love. And still she could not at once repulse the young man whose arm was around her, and who had drawn her to a gap in a stone wall, where he made her sit down while she answered him. Strange feelings had swept over her as she heard Jimmie Carleton’s voice telling her how much she was beloved,—how from the first moment he saw her he had been interested in her, and asking her again if she had anything to give the “recreant Jim.” He said the last playfully, but there was a great fear at his heart lest her silence portended evil to him. “No, Mr. Carleton. I have no heart to give you. I buried it with George; I can never love another. Forgive me if in any way I have misled you. I was only kind to you as I would be to any soldier.” “Bill Baker, for instance,” came savagely from Jimmie’s lips. He was cruelly disappointed, for he had not believed Annie would refuse him as she had done. He thought a good deal of himself as a _Carleton_. Nay, he believed himself superior to the man who was standing between him and the woman he coveted, and to be so decidedly refused by one who had been content with a person in George Graham’s position angered him for a moment. Annie knew he was offended, and when he spoke of Bill Baker, she said to him gently: