Very kind, and gentle, and pitiful was Tom’s demeanor toward Maude. During the day and the night, when she had sat by Arthur in Lois’s cabin, he had not been near her; but, after all was over, he went to her, and, with the authority of a friend and brother, insisted that she should take the rest she needed so much. And Maude gave way at the sound of his soothing, quieting voice, and, with a flood of tears, did what he bade her do. And then Tom sat by her, and bathed her throbbing head, and smoothed her beautiful hair, and paid back in part the services she had rendered him when he lay sick in Squire Tunbridge’s house. Maude was not ill,—only exhausted,—both physically and mentally the exhaustion showing itself in the quiet, listless state into which she lapsed, paying but little attention to what was passing around her, and offering no suggestion or remonstrance when told of her uncle’s plan to accompany Captain Simms and his men to Knoxville. Over Paul Haverill, too, a change had passed. The attack upon him by his old friends and neighbors, though long expected, had been sudden and terrible when it came, and as he watched the burning of the house which had been his so long, he felt that every tie which bound him to the old place was severed. Then came swiftly the fearful tragedy of the mountains, when Arthur was brought to him dead. Stunned and bewildered by the startling events which had followed each other so rapidly, Paul was hardly able to counsel for himself, and assented readily to the plan which had really originated with Captain Carleton, who had another scheme underlying that, but who suggested both so skillfully that Paul Haverill fancied they were his own ideas, and gave them as such to Maude. They would go to Knoxville with the soldiers, he said; thence to Nashville. They had some relatives living there, and, after resting for a little, they would continue their journeyings North, going, perhaps, as far as New York. “I always wanted to travel North,” he said, “but my affairs kept me at home. Now I have no affairs. My neighbors have relieved me of such commodities and I want to get away from a spot where I have witnessed such dreadful things. We all need change. You, Maude, more than I, and Charlie more than either. I don’t know what has come over the boy. That horrible night and morning were too much for him.” Maude knew that so far as Charlie was concerned, her uncle had spoken truly. Charlie was greatly changed, and his eyes had in them a scared look, as if every detail of the horrors of the fight on the mountain had stamped itself indelibly upon his mind, and was never for an instant forgotten.