Even then, in the presence of an agitation, a humiliation peculiarly keen to a man of his type, he was not first in Mrs. Gwynn's thoughts. She was reviewing the day and wondering if this connection between the lack of the widow's weeds and the presence of the Yankee officer was suggested to any of the sewing contingent. A vague gesture, a pause, a remembered facial expression, sudden, involuntary, at the sight of him and her,--all had a new interpretation in the sequence of this disclosure. They had thought it the equivalent of the acceptance of a new suitor, and the supposed favored lover had thought so himself! The recollection of her woful married life, with its train of barbarities, and rancors, and terrors, both grotesque and horrible, that still tortured her present--the leisure moments of her laborious days--was bitterly brought to mind for a moment. That she, of all the women in the world--that _she_ should be contemplating matrimony anew! She gave a light laugh that had in it so little mirth, was so little apposite to ridicule, that he did not feel it a fleer. "You did not mean it, then?" "Not for one moment." "You did not have me in mind?" "No--no--never at all!" "Leonora--Mrs. Gwynn--this is like death to me--I--I--" "I am very sorry--" "I do not reproach you," he interrupted. "It is my own folly, my own fault! But I have lived on this hope; it is all the life I have. You do not withdraw it utterly? May I not think that in time--" "No--no--I have no intention of ever marrying again. I--I--was not--not--happy." "But I am different--" he hesitated. He could not exactly find words to protest his conviction of his superiority to her husband, a man she had loved once. "I mean--we are congenial. I am very considerably older; I am nearly thirty-one. My views in life are fixed, definite; my occupation is settled. Might not--" "I am sorry, Captain Baynell; I would not willingly add to the unhappiness, real or imaginary, of any one--but all this is worse than useless. I must ask you not to recur to the subject. And now I must leave you, for the 'ladies' are going to bed, and I must hear them say their prayers." He seemed about to detain her with further protestations, then desisted, evidently with a hopeless realization of futility. "Ask them to remember me in their petitions," he only said with a dreary sort of smile.