Annie could not tell. She was not sorry that Jimmie should think of her as he did, and that night when the stars came out in the sky she looked tearfully up at them wondering which was the one watched for by the childish young man, and the little boy who died. Mrs. Carleton had taken it for granted that if Jimmie came back Annie would be her daughter, and she clung to her with a love and tenderness second only to what she felt for Rose. Poor Rose! She had listened with some degree of interest to such portions of Jimmie’s letter as Annie chose to read to her, but it had no power to rouse her from the state of apathy into which she had fallen. She never smiled now, and rarely spoke except to answer a question, but sat all day by the window in her own room, and looked away to the southward, where all her thoughts were centered. It was very strange that nothing could be heard of her husband except that he was shot down dead. A dozen corroborated that fact, but his body had not been found on the field, nor was any mention ever made of him in any official accounts. Once Rose had been startled from her stupor by a soldier, who pretended to have seen her husband in one of the Southern prisons, but a closer examination proved that the man was intoxicated, and had told what he did in the hope that money might be given him for the intelligence, and then Rose sank back into her former condition, the same hopeless look in her eyes which had been there from the moment she heard her husband’s name among the killed, and the same look of anguish upon her face which never relaxed a muscle, as she watched indifferently the preparations made by her mother and Annie for an event which under other circumstances would have stirred every pulsation of her heart. But when on Christmas morning, the bell from St. Luke’s was sending forth its joyous peal for the child born in Bethlehem more than eighteen hundred years ago, there came a softer, more natural look to Rose’s eyes, and her lip quivered a little as she said to Annie, who was bending over her, “What is that sound in the next room like the crying of a baby?” “It is your baby, Rose; born last night. Don’t you remember it,—a beautiful little boy, with his father’s look in his eyes, and Jimmie’s dimple in his chin?” Annie hoped, by mentioning both the father and Jimmie, to awaken some interest in the little mother, whose eyes grew larger, and rounder, and brighter, as she whispered: “My baby, I can’t understand. It is all so strange and mysterious. How came I with a baby, Annie? Bring it to me, please.” They brought it to her, and laid it in her arms, and then stood watching her as the first tokens of the mother’s love came over her face and crept into her eyes, which gradually began to fill with tears, until, at last, a storm of sobs and moans burst forth, as Rose rocked to and fro, whispering to her child: