Even to this the brother gave no reply, but made a remark with reference to the rapid ripening of the grain in the wheat-fields that skirted the road beyond. A duller wit than that of Elsie Brand might have become aware that he was avoiding an unpleasant subject; and the young girl recognized the fact, but gave it an entirely erroneous explanation, believing that he must have heard some peculiarly threatening news from the scene of the invasion, making the peril of the troops about to leave more deadly than it would have been under ordinary circumstances, and that he dreaded to enter upon the theme at all, for fear of alarming her. As a consequence, her next words were a disclaimer of her own fears. "Oh, Carlton, you need not be afraid to speak of it to me. Much as I have dreaded your going away, I know, now, that it is your duty, when your own State is invaded; and I have made up my mind to bear the separation, and even to think of you, my own dear brother, as in danger, without saying one word to hold you back." "Have you?" That spasm was again upon his face, and the words were hoarse; but again the eye and the ear of the sister missed the recognition of any thing unusual. "Yes; and so has Margaret." "Has she?" The spasm had not gone off his face, and the second question was asked even more hoarsely than the first. For some reason that the young girl could not understand, he turned away from her, walked down to the end of the piazza, and stood looking off. What he was suffering at that moment, with three or four of the most powerful passions known to humanity tearing at his heart-strings at once, none may know who have not passed through the same terrible ordeal which he was then enduring. There were only the fays who may have been playing among the green grass, and the dryads yet lingering among the whispering leaves of the maples, looking in at the end of the piazza upon his face: had they been human eyes, what of wrestling and struggle might they not have seen! When he turned to walk back towards the spot where his sister was standing in surprise not unmingled with alarm, his face was again calm, but it would have shown, to the observant eye, a calmness like that of despair. His words, too, were forced when they came: "You and Margaret both, Elsie, love me so well, I know, that you would give up almost any thing to please me; but I do not intend to task either of you too far. I am not going--that is, business detains me so that I cannot--I am not going to Harrisburgh." "Business!" Elsie Brand had never before, in her whole young life, uttered a word so hardly or in a tone so nearly approaching to a sneer, as she spoke the single word at that moment. Were the words of Margaret Hayley ringing in her ear, and did she find some terrible confirmation, now, of what had before been so impossible to believe? "Business!--what business, Carlton, _can_ be sufficient to keep you at home when they seem to need you so much?"