_Mrs. G_. Will you go over to the British side, Helen? Will you go over to the side of wrong and oppression? Would you link yourself with our cruel and pursuing enemy? Oh no, no no,--that could not be--never, Amid the world of fearful thoughts that name brings, how could we place your image? Oh God, I did not count on this. I knew that this war was to bring us toil, and want, and fear, and haply bloody death; and I could have borne it unmurmuringly; but--God forgive me,--that the child I nursed in these arms should forsake me, and join with our deadly foes against us--I did not count on this. _Helen_. Yes--that's the look,--the very look--all night I saw it;--it does not move me now, as it did then. It is shadows of these things that are so fearful, for with the real comes the unreckoned power of suffering. Mother, this dark coil hath Heaven wound, not we. The tie which makes his path the way of God to me, was linked ere this war was,--and war cannot undo it now. It is a bitter fate, I know,--a bitter and a fearful one. _Mrs. G_. Ay, ay,--thank God! You had forgotten, Helen, that in that army's pay, nay, all around us even now are hordes and legions. _Helen_. I know it,--I know it all. I do indeed. _Mrs. G_. Helen, will you place yourself defenceless amidst that savage race, whose very name from your childhood upwards, has filled you with such strange fear? Yesterday I chid you for those fancies,--I was wrong,--they were warnings, heaven-sent, to save you from this doom. What was that dream you talked of then? _Helen_. Dreams are nothing. Will you unsay a life's lessons now when most I need them? _Mrs. G_. Yesterday, all day, a shadow as of coming evil lay upon me, but now I remember the forgotten vision whence it fell. Yesternight I had a dream, Helen, such as yours might be; for in my broken and fevered slumbers, wherever I turned, one vision awaited me. There was a savage arm, and over it fell a shower of golden hair, and ever and anon, in the shadowy light of my dream, a knife glittered and waved before me. We were safe, but over one,--some young and innocent and tender one it was--there hung a hopeless and inexorable fate. Once methought it seemed the young English girl that was wedded here last winter, and once she turned her eye upon me--Ha!--I had forgotten that glance of agony--surely, Helen, it was _yours_. _Mrs. G_. Helen! my child--(_Aside_.) There it is, that same curdling glance,--'twas but a dream, Helen. Why do you stand there so white and motionless--why do you look on me with that fixed and darkening eye?--'twas but a dream! _Helen_. And where were you?--tell me truly. Was it not by a gurgling fountain among the pine trees there? and was it not noon-day in your dream, a hot, bright, sultry noon, and a few clouds swelling in the western sky, and nothing but the trilling locusts astir? _Mrs. G_. How wildly you talk; how should I remember any thing like this?