Of Charlotte's impulsive act her father and mother made something repulsive and sinister. She was made to go everywhere, but was duennaed like a naughty Spanish princess. Her every act was remarked. Did she pine she was berated and told to rouse herself; did she laugh she was frowned down. Her neat little escritoire frequently betrayed traces of an overhauling by suspicious alien fingers. There was little need of that after the first few days. The news of Jesse Dick's death at Donelson went almost unnoticed but for two Chicago households--one out Hardscrabble way, one on Wabash Avenue. It was otherwise as unimportant as an uprooted tree in the path of an avalanche that destroys a village. At Donelson had fallen many sons of Chicago's pioneer families; young men who were to have carried on the future business of the city; boys who had squired its daughters to sleigh-rides, to dances, to church sociables and horseback parties; who had drilled with Ellsworth's famous Zouaves. A Dick of Hardscrabble could pass unnoticed in this company. There came to Charlotte a desperate and quite natural desire to go to his people; to see his mother; to talk with his father. But she never did. Instinctively her mother sensed this (perhaps, after all, she had been eighteen herself, once) and by her increased watchfulness made Hardscrabble as remote and unattainable as Heaven. "Where are you going, Charlotte?" "Just out for a breath of air, mother." "Take Carrie with you." "Oh, mother, I don't want----" "Take Carrie with you." She stopped at home. She had no tangible thing over which to mourn; not one of those bits of paper or pasteboard or linen or metal over which to keen; nothing to hold in her two hands, or press to her lips or wear in her bosom. She did not even possess one of those absurd tintypes of the day showing her soldier in wrinkled uniform and wooden attitude against a mixed background of chenille drapery and Versailles garden. She had only her wound and her memory and perhaps these would have healed and grown dim had not Isaac Thrift and his wife so persistently rubbed salt in the one and prodded the other. After all, she was little more than eighteen, and eighteen does not break so readily. If they had made light of it perhaps she would soon have lifted her head again and even cast about for consolation. "Moping again!" "I'm not moping, father." "What would you call it then?" "Why, I'm just sitting by the window in the dusk. I often do. Even before--before----" "There's enough and to spare for idle hands to do, I dare say. Haven't you seen to-day's paper nor heard of what's happened again at Manassas that you can sit there like that!" She knew better than to explain that for her Jesse Dick died again with the news of each fresh battle.