Then she caught herself thinking and almost wishing that a Federal bullet might end her perplexity--that Baillie Pegram might never live to see her again. "I wonder," she thought, "if that is what Christ meant when he said that one who hates his neighbour is a murderer in his heart. It is all a blind riddle to me. Here have I been brought up a Christian, taught from my infancy that hatred is murder, and taught at the same time that it is my highest duty, as a Ronald, to go on hating all the Pegrams on earth because my father and Baillie Pegram's grandfather quarrelled over something that I know absolutely nothing about!" Presently the girl's mind reverted to the second meeting of that eventful day,--her encounter with Marshall Pollard. She wondered why he had enlisted in company with such men as those who constituted Captain Skinner's battery, for even thus early those men had become known as the worst gang of desperadoes imaginable,--a band that must be kept day and night under a discipline as rigid and as watchful as that of any State prison, lest they lapse into crimes of violence. She wondered if this meant that the peculiarly gentle-souled Marshall Pollard was trying to "throw himself away," as she had heard that men disappointed in love sometimes do,--that he wished to degrade himself by low associations. "And I am the cause of it all," she mourned. For she knew that Marshall Pollard had loved her with the love of an honest man, and that his life had been darkened, to say the least, by her inability to respond to his devotion. In this case she should have had the consolation of knowing that she had been guilty of no wilful, no conscious wrong, but, in her present mood, she was disposed to flagellate her soul for an imagined offence. "He came to me," she reflected, "loving me from the first. Little idiot that I was, I did not understand. I liked him as a girl may like a boy,--for I was only a girl then,--and I did not dream that the affection he manifested toward me meant more than that sort of thing on his part. Those things which ought to have revealed to me his state of mind meant nothing more to me then than do the little gallantries and deferences which all men pay to all women. How bitterly he reproached me at the last for having deceived him and led him on with encouragements which I at least had not intended as such. Are all women born coquettes? Is it our cruel instinct to trifle with the souls of men, as little children love to torture their pets? Have we women no principles, no earnestness, no consciences--except afterward, when remorse awakens us? Are we blind, that we do not see, and deaf that we do not hear? Or is it our nature to be cruel, especially to those who love us and offer us the best that there is in their strong natures?