I left him, found supper, and had been long asleep tinder a tree, when I grabbed savagely at some one for silently shaking me, and found it was Ned Ferry. His horse's bridle was in his hand; his face was more filled with the old pain than I had ever seen it; he spoke low and hurriedly. "Come, tell me what this means." In an envelope addressed to him in the handwriting I had first seen at Lucius Oliver's I found a scripture-text, a heading torn from a tract which the chaplain may have sent in to Charlotte in the morning. I turned it to the light of my fire. Under this printed line she had pencilled her name. I asked if he had seen her. "Ah, no! the Doctor has drugged her to sleep; but that woman who came with you was still in the parlor, reading a book, and she gave me this. What does it mean?" "Lieutenant," I replied, choking with dismay, "why mind her meanings now? Ought you not rather to ignore them? She is fevered, dejected, overwrought. Why, sir, she is the very woman to say and mean things now which she would never say or mean at any other time!" But my tone must have shown that I was only groping in desperation after anything plausible, and he waved my suggestions away. "The Doctor says that woman has been reading her an exciting story." "Yes, and that helps to account--" "Richard, it helps the wrong way; _I know that story_. After hearing that story she is, yes! the one woman of all women to send me _this_." I took it again. The signature was extended in full, with the surname blackly underlined. The first clause of the print, too, was so treated. "_Keep thy heart_," it read; "_Keep thy heart_ with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.--Charlotte _Oliver_." "Why, Lieutenant, that is just what you have done--" "You think so? But I _have done_. I will keep it no longer! Ah, I never kept it; 'twas she! Without taking it from me she kept it--'with all diligence'; otherwise I should have lost it--and her, too--and all that is finest and hardest to keep--long ago. Give me that paper; come; saddle up; you may go with me if you want, as my courier." No bugle had sounded, yet the whole camp was softly and diligently astir. We rode toward the staff tents; the pulse of enterprise enlivened him once more, though he clung to the same theme. "I have _her_ heart now, Smith, and I will keep _that_ with all diligence, for out of _that_ are the issues of _my_ life--if I live. And if I do live I will have her if I have to steal her even from herself, as last night from the Yankees."