“No, no, not that. We did not do that,” Charlie cried, with a look of horror in his blue eyes when he heard the dreadful story, and that the Southern leaders were suspected of complicity in the murder. “It would make me a Unionist, if I believed my people capable of that; but they are not,—it cannot be,” Charlie kept repeating to himself, while the great drops of sweat stood upon his white forehead, and his pulse and heart beat so rapidly, that Maude summoned the attending physician, who shook his head doubtfully at the great change for the worse in his patient. “I had hoped at least to keep him till the warm weather, but, I am afraid those bells will be the death of him,” he said, as he saw how Charlie shivered and moaned with each sound of the tolling bells. “Perhaps they would stop if you were to ask them, and tell them why,” Annie suggested to Maude; but Charlie, who heard it, exclaimed, “No, let them toll on. It is proper they should mourn for him. The South would do the same if it was our President who had been murdered.” So the bells tolled on, and the public buildings were draped in mourning, and the windows of Charlie’s room were festooned with black, and he watched the sombre drapery as it swayed in the April wind, and talked of the terrible deed, and the war which was ended, and the world to which so many thousands had gone during the long four years of strife and bloodshed. “I shall be there to-morrow,” he said, “and then perhaps I shall know why all this has been done, and if we were so wrong.” Maude and Annie, Paul Haverill and Tom Carleton watched with him through the night, and just as the beautiful Easter morning broke, and the sunlight fell upon the Rockland hills, the boy who to the last had remained true to the Southern cause, lay dead among the people who had been his foes. At Maude’s request they buried him by the side of Isaac Simms, and Capt. Carleton ordered a handsome monument, on which the names of both the boys were cut, Isaac Simms, who had died for the North, and Charlie De Vere, who, if need be, would have given his life for the South, each holding entirely different political sentiments, but both holding the same living faith which made for them an entrance to the world where all is perfect peace, and where we who now see through a glass darkly shall then see face to face, and know why these things are so. * * * * *