Her words were not very encouraging, and Annie’s tears fell like rain upon the face of the man who gave no sign that he knew where he was, or who was bending over him. Oh! how he had longed for the air of the North, as his face daily grew thinner, greyer, and more corpse-like, while his flesh seemed shrivelling and drying on his bones. Bill Baker had done what he could to ameliorate his condition,—done too much in fact, and as the result he suddenly found himself shorn of his privileges, and an inmate again of the dreadful prison. Even then he clung to and cared for Jimmie, until the pangs of starvation and the pains of sickness made him forgetful of all but himself. And there they pined and wept and waited until the day of their release, when Bill was too ill to be removed, and was left in charge of a humane family, who kindly promised to care for him until he was better. From a Rockland soldier who had been taken prisoner at the battle of the Wilderness, Jimmie had heard that Mrs. Graham was at Annapolis, and then! oh, how he longed for the time when it might be his fate to be tended and nursed by her. She would do it so gently, and so kindly and in his dreams the walls of his pestilential prison stretched away to the green fields of the North, where he walked again with Annie, and felt the clasp of her little hand, and the light of her blue eyes. She was always present with him,—she or the little Lulu, of Pequot memory. Somehow these two were strangely mixed, and when his mind began to totter as the physical strain on it became too great, the two faces were united in one body, and both bent lovingly over him, just as Annie Graham was doing now when he was past knowing or caring who ministered to him. A vague suspicion he had at intervals that in some respects there was a change, that his bed was not the filthy sand bank, nor his covering the pitiless sky. Gradually, too, there came a different look upon his face; the color was changing from the dingy gray, to a more life-like hue; flesh was showing a little beneath the skin, and the dark hair began to grow, and Annie watered the tiny curls with bitter tears, for, as proof of the terrible life whose horrors will never half be written, the once black hair was coming out streaked with grey. They knew in Rockland that he was at Annapolis, but Annie had peremptorily forbidden either Mrs. Carleton or Rose to come. “They could do no good,” she wrote. “Jimmie would not know them; and they might be in the way.” They were constantly expecting Tom from Tennessee, with Maude De Vere and her friends, and so they remained at home the more willingly, enjoining it upon Annie to write them every day, just a line to tell how Jimmie was.