"Oh, no! they were your own people. There was no collusion, I assure you." Jack almost laughed now, as the dialogue in the ambulance recurred to him, and the adroit use the men had made of their unconscious charges to secure a furlough. "No; I was more amazed than I can say when I came to myself in this charming chamber--a paradise it seemed to me, a home paradise--when your kind face bent over my pillow." "It's a cruel disappointment," she said, rising and holding the back of the chair as she tilted it toward the bed. "We were so proud of you--so proud to have any one that had fought for our dear State in our own house to nurse, to bring back to life. Every one on the street has some one from the battle, and oh, what will be said of us when people know that we--we--" But here the cruelty of the conclusion came too sharply to her mind, and she walked to the window, sobbing softly. "I can understand, believe me, Mrs. Raines, and I am going to propose a means to you whereby I shall be taken from here, and your neighbors shall never know that you entertained an enemy unawares, though God knows I don't see why we should be enemies when the battle is over. If your son were in my condition I should think very hard of my mother if she were not to him what you have been to me." "But I can't believe you're a Yankee; you were so gentle, so patient in all the dreadful times when the surgeon was cutting and hacking. Oh, I can't believe it! Oh, please say you are joking--that you wanted to give me a fright. And you have a mother?" She came over near the bed again and stood looking at him dismally, half in doubt, half in perplexed wonder; for Yankee, in her mind, suggested some such monster as the Greeks conjured when the Goths poured into the peninsula, maiming the men and debauching the women. "I said Sprague wasn't a Virginia name," she murmered, plaintively, in a last desperate attempt to fortify herself against the worst; "but there's no telling what names are in Virginia now, since Norfolk has grown so big and folks come in that way from all over the world." Jack could scarcely keep a serious face, as this humorous lament displayed the pride of the Dominion and the unconscious Boeotianism of the provincial. "Now, Mrs. Raines, here is what I propose: Major Atterbury, of whom you read to me, is my nearest friend. We have been college comrades; he has passed weeks at my home, and I have been asked to his, and meant to come this autumn vacation, if the war had not broken out. I will write to his mother, and she will have me removed to her house, and it need never be known that you gave aid and comfort to the enemy."