"But have you ever considered what it must have cost the mother to give up her daughter?" "Why need she have given her up? Marriages between the North and the South have been common enough without any family breach." She was utterly sure that he knew neither to whom he was talking nor what had been the real cause of her separation from her daughter. She experienced a sort of wild inner exultation that at last had come the moment when she might justify herself; when she might tell the whole dreadful story which had been as eating poison in her veins. She raised her head proudly, and looked at him with her whole soul in her eyes. "If you have patience to listen," she said, feeling her cheeks warm, "and will pardon my being personal, I should like to tell you what has happened to me. My husband was a colonel in the Confederate army. We were married when I was seventeen, in a brief furlough he won by being wounded at the battle of the Wilderness. I saw him, in the four years of the war before he fell at Five Forks, less than a dozen times, and always for the briefest visits--poor scraps of fearful happiness torn out of long stretches of agony. My daughter, my only child, was born after her father's death. Our fortune had gone to the Cause. My father and my husband both refused to invest money abroad. They considered it disloyal, and they put everything into Confederate securities even after they felt sure they should get nothing back. They were too loyal to withhold anything when the country was in deadly peril." She paused, but he did not speak, and with swelling breast and parching throat she went on:-- "At Five Forks my husband was killed in a hand-to-hand fight with a Northern officer. He struck his enemy down after he had received his own death-wound. I pray God he did not know the day was lost. He had gone through so much, I hope that was spared him. On the other side of death he must have found some comfort to help him bear it. God must have had some comfort for our poor boys when he permitted the cause of liberty to be lost." She pressed her clenched hand against her bosom, and as she did so her eyes met those of her companion. She felt the sympathy of his look, but something recalled her to the sense that she was speaking to one from the North. "It is not the cause of liberty to you," she said. "I have forgotten again. I have not spoken of all this for so long. I have not dared; but to-day--to-day I must speak, and you must forgive me if I use the old language." He dropped his glance as if he felt it an intrusion to see her bitter emotion, and said softly: "I think I understand. You need not apologize." "After the war," she went on hurriedly and abruptly, "I lived for my daughter. I worked for her. She--she was like her father." She choked, but regained the appearance of composure by a mighty effort.