"Thanks; I hope you will find my next one more becoming, since it is to be that of Brigadier-General." Although Matthew Loring's sight was impaired, his locomotion slow, and his left hand and arm yet helpless, his sense of hearing was acute enough to hear the words even across Monroe's conversation, for his sunken eyes lit up as he twisted his head towards the speaker: "What's that, Kenneth? You to command a brigade?" "So they tell me," assented McVeigh. "The commission just reached me." "Good enough! Do you hear that, Gertrude? A Brigadier-General at twenty-five. Well, I don't see what more a man could want." "I do," he said, softly, to Judithe, so softly that she felt rather than heard the words, to which his eyes bore witness. Then he turned to reply to Mr. Loring's questions of military movements. "No, I can't give you much special information today," and he smiled across at Monroe, when Loring found fault with the government officials who veiled their plans and prospects from the taxpayers--the capitalists of the South who made the war possible. "But the instructions received lead me to believe a general movement of much importance is about to be made in our department, and my opportunities will be all a soldier could wish." "So you have become a Brigadier-General instead of the Lieutenant we knew only three years ago," and Judithe's eyes rested on him graciously for an instant, as Monroe and Gertrude helped Loring out to the wheeled chair on the lawn. "You travel fast--you Americans! I congratulate you." She had arisen and crossed the room to the little writing desk in the corner. He followed with his eyes her graceful walk and the pretty fluttering movements of her hands as she drew out note paper and busied herself rather ostentatiously. He smiled as he noticed it; she was afraid of a tete-a-tete; she was trying to run away, if only to the farther side of the room. "I shall consider myself a more fit subject for congratulation if you prove more kind to the General than you were to the Lieutenant." "People usually are," she returned lightly. "I do not fancy you will have much of unkindness to combat, except from the enemy." Evilena entered the room humming an air, and her brother remarked carelessly that the first of the enemy to invade their domain was not very formidable at present, though Captain Jack Monroe had made a fighting record for himself in the western campaign. Judithe did not appear particularly interested in the record of the Northern campaign, but Evilena, who had been too much absorbed in the question of wardrobe to keep informed of the late arrivals, fairly gasped at the name. "Really and truly, is that Yankee here?" she demanded, "right here in the house? Caroline said it wasn't a Yankee--just some friend of yours." "So he is." "And--a--_Yankee_?"