"No, I do not like him. Do you?" "Why,--yes,--I do. I--I thought everybody did." She averted her face and toyed with the sweet-pea vines. Suddenly she gulped, faced me, blinked rapidly, and said "If I oughtn't to call him--that,--then I oughtn't to have called--" she dropped her eyes and bit her lip. "_That_," I replied, "is a very different matter! At least I had hoped it was!" Her rejoinder came in a low, grieved monotone: "Did you say _had_ hoped?" It was the sweetest question my ear had ever caught, and I asked her, I scarce know how, if I might still say "do hope". "Why, I--I didn't know you ever did say it. I don't see that I have any right to forbid you saying things--to--to yourself." So we played the game--oldest game on earth--and loveliest. Bungling moves we made, as you see, and sometimes did not know whose move it was. At length she admitted that this _is_ a very unsafe world in which to be kind to soldiers. I told how _fickle_ some of them were. She would not say she would--or wouldn't--make my case a permanent exception or a solitary one; yet with me she blissfully pooh-poohed the idea that our acquaintance was new, she being so wonderfully like my mother, and I being so wonderfully ditto, ditto. And when I burst into a blazing eulogy of my mother, my listener gave me kinder looks than I ever deserved of any woman alive. On my trying to reciprocate, she asked me for more flowers and hurried back to our earlier theme. "And really, you know, they say she's almost as truly a scout as Ned Fer'--as Lieutenant Ferry-Durand. She's from New Orleans, you know, and she's like us, half-Creole; but her other half is Highland Scotch--isn't that romantic! When she told us about it she laughed and said it explained some things in her which nothing else could excuse! Wasn't that funny!--oh, pshaw! it doesn't sound a bit funny as I tell it, but she said it in such a droll way! She was so full of fun and frolic that day! You can't conceive how full of them she is--sometimes; how soberly she _can_ say the funniest things, and how _funnily_ she can say the soberest things!" [Illustration: "Don't you like him?" she asked, and tried to be very arch.] "You say she was so full of fun that day; what day?" The young thing gaped at me, gasped, and melted half to the ground: "O--oh--I've let it out!" "Yes, you may as well go right on, now." She straightened to her toes, covered her open mouth an instant, and then said "Yes, we knew her--at our house--in New Orleans--poor New Orleans! Your mother--oh, your splendid, lovely little mother is such a brave Confederate!" "My mother brought her to your house?" "Yes, oh, yes! and that's why it isn't wrong to tell _you_. Charlotte's been three times through the lines, to and from the city; once by way of Natchez and twice through Baton Rouge. And oh, the things she's brought out to our poor boys in the hospitals!" "Generals' uniforms, for example?"