The young girl's eyes flashed, her cheeks were flushed, and any one who looked upon her at that moment would have believed her almost brave enough for an Amazon and more than a little warped in her perceptions of what constituted the right and the wrong of domestic relations. How little, meanwhile, they would have known her! Ninety-nine out of one hundred of the women unwilling to confess that they had ever read a page of the Wyman or the Kearney scandal, and saying "hush!" and "tut! tut!" to any one who pretended to make the least defence of either--would have been found infinitely more approachable for any purpose of actual wrong or vice, than rattling, out-spoken and irrepressible Joe Harris! Wyman was dead, as she had said--having expiated, with his life, so much as could be expiated of all past wrong, and having partially hidden the memory of his crime by his brave offer of satisfaction to the wronged husband and his unflinching conduct before the enemies of his country in battle. But how little she thought, at the moment of speaking, that the bullet was already billeted for the breast of Kearney, and that he was to fall, but a few weeks after, a sacrifice to his own rashness and the incapacity of others! Does war indeed have a mission beyond the national good or evil for which it is instituted? And are its missiles of death and the diseases to which its exposures give rise, especially commissioned to repay past crimes and by-gone errors? Not so, inevitably!--or many a worthless incapable and many a dishonest trader in his country's blood and treasure would before this have bitten the dust,--and Baker, Lyon, Lander, Winthrop and fifty other prominent martyrs to the cause of the Union would yet have been alive and battling for the right! Suddenly, the conversation between Josephine Harris and Bell Crawford came to a conclusion, and the former sprung to her feet with a frightened and angry "ough!" while the latter leaned back in her chair in a state of stupefied vexation not easy to describe. The cause of this excitement may be briefly given. Both at the same instant discovered a face thrust down to the level of their own and immediately between them, with a familiarity most inexcusable in a stranger. Yet the face was certainly that of an entire stranger--a respectably dressed elderly man, with full gray hair and beard, and holding a speckled Leghorn hat in his hand. "Ough! get out! who are you and what do you want here?" broke out the excited girl, with a propensity, meanwhile, to repay this second impudence of the day by such a sound boxing of the ears as would make the event one to be remembered; while Miss Crawford took a rather more practical view of the matter, with the single word "Impertinence" and a supplementary call of "Waiter!" "Ladies! ladies! what is the matter?" asked the elderly intruder, as he saw the movements of the two girls, and the waiter hurrying up with his towel over his arm, in obedience to the call.