"What do _you_ know about it?" and _his_ tones were harsh and almost menacing. "Do we ask you women to decide what we shall do, where we shall go, and where we shall stay?" "Oh, Carlton!" and the cry seemed to come from the very heart of the young girl. It was perhaps the first harsh word that had ever fallen on her ear, aimed at her from the lips of the brother she so adored. God only knew the agony under which that harsh word had been wrung out, as only he could know the agony it might cause! The cry instantly melted the heart to which it appealed. Carlton Brand took the hand of his sister in his own, kissed her tenderly, and said: "Forgive me, Elsie, if I spoke as I should never speak to _you_! But you do not know, sometimes, what moves men to harshness which they afterwards bitterly repent." "But you are not going with the regiment?" again she asked. "No!--I have told you I was not, Elsie!" and the tone came very near to being a harsh one, once more. "I am sorry--very sorry, Carlton!" "Sorry?" and the often-recurring spasm which again passed over his features, could not have been unobserved by the young girl, for her own face seemed to reflect it. "Sorry? Are you indeed sorry that I am not going into--that I am not going to be absent from you?" "Oh, no, Carlton! heaven knows I am not!" said Elsie, and the merry blue eyes were filled with tears. "But I think you ought to go; and you do not know, Carlton, how much may hang upon it. Do you love Margaret--really and truly love her?" "Love her? as my own soul!" answered Carlton Brand. He did not say "as his own _life_"! "Why do you ask, after all that you have known of our attachment and our engagement?" "Because, Carlton"--and the young girl, weeping the while under an impulse of feeling that she could scarcely herself understand, caught him by the arm and drew down his head towards her--"because I believe that if you do not go with the Reserves, Margaret will think that you do not do so because--oh, I cannot speak the word!" "Because what? Speak it out!" and he seemed to be nerving himself to meet some shock that was likely to need all his energies. "Because"--in a voice very low and broken--"because you are afraid to go--because you are a _coward_!" "Has she said as much?" and the eyes of the speaker, very sad, troubled, and almost wild, seemed still to have power to read the very soul of the young girl before him. Elsie could not speak at first, but she nodded twice, and never death-bell of a condemned criminal rung out more clearly or more frightfully on the startled air, tolling the knell of a last hope, than the whisper that came at last from her lips: "Yes!"