He replied that certainly love sometimes _germinated_ at first sight, and I interrupted greedily that that was all I claimed--except that love could also, at times, _grow to maturity_ with amazing speed, a speed I never could have credited previous to these last four days. And he admitted as much, but thought time only could prove such love; whereto I rejoined that that was what she had answered. He glanced at me suddenly, then smoothed his horse's mane, and said, gently, "That means you have declared yourself to her?" I confessed I had, and told him how, on our journey to Squire Wall's, being stung to desperation by the infantile way in which she had drooled out to others what my love had sacredly confided to her alone, I had abruptly confronted her with the fact, and in the ensuing debate, carried away by the torrent of my emotions, had offered her my love, for life and all. "And she--ah, yes. I see; and I see, too, that in all she ever said or did or seemed, before, she never made herself such a treasure to be longed for and fought and lived for as in the way in which she--" He paused. "Refused me! Oh, it's so; it's so! Ah! if you could have witnessed her dignity, her wisdom, her grace, her compassionate immovableness, you'd never think of her as the little Harper girl again. She said that if the unpremeditated, headlong way in which I had told my passion were my only mistake, and if it were only for my sake, she would not, if she could, answer favorably, and that I, myself, at last, would not have a girl who would have a man who would offer his love in that way, and that she would not have a man who would have a girl who would have a man who should offer his love in that way." I call it one of the sweetest kindnesses ever done me, that Ned Ferry heard me to the end of that speech and did not smile. Instead he asked "Did she say that as if a'--as if--amused?" "No, Lieutenant, she nearly cried. Oh, I wish we were on some dangerous errand to-night, instead of just camp and bed!" "Well, that's all right, Richard; we are." XLII "CAN I GET THERE BY CANDLE-LIGHT?" After a few minutes we quitted the public way by an obscure path in the woods on our right. When we had followed this for two or three miles we turned to the left again and pressed as softly as we could into a low tangled ground where the air seemed stagnant and mosquitoes stung savagely. We wiped away the perspiration in streams. I pushed forward to Ferry's side and whispered my belief that at last we were to see rain. "Yes," he said, "and with thunder and lightning; just what we want to-night." I asked why. "Oh, they hate our thunder-storms, those Yankee patrols."