To Mrs. Cameron and Juno it was a relief to have Katy taken from their hands, and though they made a show of opposition, they were easily quieted, and helped her off with alacrity, the mother promising to see that the house was properly cared for, and Juno offering to send the latest fashions which might be suitable, as soon as they appeared. Bell was heartily sorry to part with the young sister, who seemed going from her forever. “I know you will never come back. Something tells me so,” she said, as she stood with her arms around Katy’s waist, and her lips occasionally touching Katy’s forehead. “But I shall see you,” she continued; “I am coming to the farm-house in the summer, and you may say to Aunt Betsy that I like her ever so much, and”—Bell glanced behind her, to see that no one was listening, and then continued—“tell her a certain officer was sick a few days in a hospital last winter, and one of his men brought to him a dish of the most delicious dried peaches he ever ate. That man was from _Silverton_, and the fruit was sent to him, he said, in a salt bag, by a nice old lady, for whose brother he used to work. Just to think that the peaches I helped to pare, coloring my hands so that the stain did not come off in a month, should have gone so straight to _Bob_!” and Bell’s fine features shone with a light which would have told Bob Reynolds he was beloved, if the lips did refuse to confess it. “I’ll tell her,” Katy said, and then bidding them all good-bye, and putting her hand on Uncle Ephraim’s arm, she went with him from the home where she had lived but two years, and those the saddest, most eventful ones of her short life. CHAPTER XL. MARK AND HELEN. There was much talk in Silverton when it was known that Katy had come to stay until her husband returned from the war, and at first the people watched her curiously as she came among them again, so quiet, so subdued, so unlike the Katy of old that they would have hardly recognized her but for the beauty of her face and the sunny smile she gave to all, and which rested oftenest on the poor and suffering, who blessed her as the angel of their humble homes, praying that God would remember her for all she was to them. Wilford had censured her at first for going to Silverton, when he preferred she should stay in New York, hinting darkly at the reason of her choice, and saying to her once, when she told him how the Sunday before her twenty-first birthday she had knelt before the altar and taken upon herself the vows of confirmation, “Your saintly cousin is, of course, delighted, and that I suppose is sufficient, without my congratulations.”