"What was he doing to-day? Nursing in the hospital?" Mrs. Clendenon asks, curiously. "_Dying_ in the hospital," the captain answers, with a break in his clear voice. "Down with the fever--died this evening." "Poor boy!" his mother said, pityingly, and a tear in the younger woman's eye echoed it. "The worst of it is," the captain goes on, "he leaves a poor, timid little wife, and two rosebuds of children--the mother as childish and fragile as the rest." "And what is to become of her?" query both ladies at once. "I want to send her home to her relatives. She was a Richmond girl. I remember meeting her there once when my company passed through on its way to Manassas. Arthur, poor fellow! invited me to call on her. She was then a charming little creature, very different from the heart-broken little thing she is now. Mother, I would like it very much if you would call on her to-morrow, and try to comfort her a little--she seems so friendless and desolate. You, too, Mrs. Winans, if you can conveniently do so." Both ladies expressed a desire to visit the bereaved young widow and her little ones. "Then I will take you down there to-morrow," he said, gratefully, with a smile in his honest gray eyes. "Ah! how it pains me to meet, as one must frequently do here, old friends and old faces, only to close the lids over eyes that have been so dear! Poor Arthur! poor boy! but it is one of the sad inevitable experiences of life." "Grace, my love," Mrs. Clendenon went on to say, "I have Doctor Constant's authority to forbid your appearance at the hospital to-night. He says you are so unremitting in attentions to his patients that there is danger of your falling sick, and our losing your valuable services altogether, if you persist in taking no rest at all."