At first his prayer is denied,--notwithstanding the girl still loves him. The talk of the lovers is heard by _General Warren_, who appears all the while to have been asleep, and presently the father recalls the departing lover, and, for his daughter’s sake, consents to a reconciliation and a marriage: and thus a pretty picture of happy love and peace is made to close an ordeal of trouble and grief. It seems a pity that some device could not have been found to make the young soldier carry the despatch without being aware of the treachery that was intended. He is forced to act in a dishonorable manner, and he forfeits all sympathy in the action of the play. There is no limit to the pathos of conflicting emotions that can be pictured, incident to war, and especially to a civil war. Some of that pathos is indicated at moments in this drama. The little children, concocting a letter to their soldier brother; the agonized lover, who while waiting for the moment in which the trick to which he has lent himself will be accomplished, is fondly treated by the girl whom he loves, and toward whom he feels that he has been deceitful; the worn, ill, suffering Confederate general, gleeful in his supposed triumph, waiting for the safe arrival of the supplies that will relieve his wretched troops, and sitting with his wife by his side and their two young children at their knees; the blind, almost insane fury of that deceived, resentful old man when he learns of the capture of those supplies--those incidents and others like to them are exceedingly effective. There is excess of dialogue and there is too much attention to unimportant detail delaying the action. The incident of the father’s kneeling to his daughter is copied from Wills’s splendid play of “Charles I”--in [Illustration: Photograph by Otto Sarony. Belasco’s Collection. CHARLOTTE WALKER AS _AGATHA WARREN_, IN “THE WARRENS OF VIRGINIA”]