With many kisses and loving words of sympathy, he bade his sister good-bye when his leave had expired, and then in the hall stood a moment while his mother whispered something to him which made him start, and turn pale as he said: “Poor Will! he would have been so glad!” Then, as if the news had brought Rose nearer to him, and made her more the object of his special care, he went back to her a second time, and wound his arms about her lovingly, as he said, “Poor little wounded dove! God’s promises are for the widow and fatherless, and He will care for you;” and Rose guessed to what he referred, but there was no answering joy upon her face, and her hands were pressed upon her heart as she watched him from the window, going from her just as Will had gone, and whispered to herself, “It would have been too much happiness if Will had lived; but now I cannot be glad.” CHAPTER XXVI COURSE OF EVENTS. With a howl of despair, Mrs. Baker came rushing into the kitchen of the Mather mansion, one morning in November, startling Annie with her vehemence as she thrust into her hand a dirty, half-worn envelope, which she said was from Bill, who had been missing since August, and who, it now appeared, was at Andersonville. “Might better be dead,” his mother said, and then she explained that the letter she brought Annie had come in one to herself received that morning from Bill. How he ever got it through the lines was a mystery which he did not explain; nor did Annie care, inasmuch as it brought news direct from Jimmie. He had written to her with the pencil and on the sheet of paper Bill had brought him, for Bill Baker was employed outside the prison walls, and allowed many privileges which were denied to the poor wretches who crowded that swampy pen. In short, Bill had taken the Confederate oath,—“had done some tall swearin’,” as he wrote to Annie, giving as an excuse for the treasonable act, “that he couldn’t _stan’_ the racket” in that horrible place, where twenty thousand human beings were crowded together in a space of twenty-five acres, and part of that a marshy swamp, teeming with filth and scum, and hideous living things. Another reason, too, Bill gave, and that was pity for the “Corp’ral,” to whom he could occasionally take little extras, and whom he would have scarcely recognized, he said, so worn and changed had he become from his long imprisonment.