This was Rose’s idea of comfort. Money, in her estimation, was to the poor a panacea for nearly every evil, but all her wealth could not avail to quiet the feeling of remorse from which Mrs. Baker was suffering. With a sob she thanked the kind-hearted Rose, and then continued, “’Tain’t the poverty so much, nor the knowin’ that he’s dead, though that is bad enough. It’s the something that tells me I or’to have brung him up better. I never sent him to meetin’, never went myself, never had him baptized, though I did try once to learn him ‘Now I lay me—’ but he, that’s my man, laughed me out of it. He said there wasn’t any God, that we all come by chance, but I knew better. _I_ had a prayin’ mother, and though I forgot what she learnt me, it ’pears to come back to me now. Oh, Harry, I wish I’d done different, I do, I do,” and the repentant woman buried her face again in the scanty pillows, while Rose looked pityingly on. Here was a case she could not reach. Money would not cure that aching heart, or quiet that guilty conscience. “Mrs. Graham would know exactly what to say,” Rose thought, wishing more and more that she, too, possessed the wisdom which would have told her what it was poor Mrs. Baker needed. Sitting down beside her, Rose talked to her of _Bill_, who, her husband said, was highly complimented for having captured a rebel. Will had not seen the prisoner, she said, or heard his name; he only knew the fact, and that Bill was greatly praised. This was some consolation to Mrs. Baker, but it did not take the pain away, and as she was not inclined to converse, Rose soon bade her good-bye and left her there alone in her deep sorrow. The following Sunday, just as the notes of the organ were dying away in the opening service, a bent, shrinking figure stole noiselessly in at the open door, and Rose Mather recognized beneath the thin black veil, the haggard face of Widow Baker, who, except on funeral occasions, had never before been seen within the walls of the church. Annie saw her, too, and while Rose, touched with the humble attempt she had made to put on something like mourning for her child, thought how she would give her an entire new suit of black, Annie thought how she would daily pray that the blow which had fallen so crushingly might result in everlasting good to the now stricken mother. Scarcely less keen, but of a far different nature, was the grief of Widow Simms. There was no black upon her leghorn bonnet. She would not have worn it if Isaac had been dead, but every expression of her stern face told how constantly her heart was going out after her darling boy, her captured Isaac languishing in his sultry prison, sick perhaps, and pining for his mother. How savage she felt toward Beauregard and all his clan, resolving at times to start herself for Richmond, and beard the lion in his den.