"'Domestic happiness! thou only bliss Of Paradise that has survived the fall.' "Miss De Vere, cannot you suppose that a man getting into the 'sere and yellow leaf'--I am almost six-and-thirty years old--must feel the need of some 'fair spirit for his minister?' And," his glance falling, hers following, on his empty sleeve, "what woman could I ask to give herself to half a man?" She slackens her pace to look up at him, in genuine honest astonishment. "Captain Clendenon, you have never been so quixotic, so absurdly chivalrous as to think that any woman would not feel honored to cast her lot with yours in spite of your honorable misfortune--yes, if you had lost both your arms in the army as nobly as you have lost one!" "Thank you! thank you!" he answers, deeply moved, and seeing the sudden waves of hot color breaking over the warm Southern beauty of her face, he looks blindly away and thinks what a noble-hearted girl she is, and how he has misjudged her in thinking her a fine, fashionable flirt, as all along he had been doing, when he thought of her at all, which was but seldom. And then they are at the steps of the elegant De Vere mansion, and she gently invites him to enter. He shakes his head. "I thank you; but I will continue my stroll. One gets so little fresh air indoors, and I have been so confined lately. To-day I am off duty, and making the most of it. My respects to the family." "Oh!" she says, turning, with her foot on the marble step. "May I ask you one question?" "A dozen, if you please," he returned, gallantly. "It is only this: It is a current report here that the Hon. Mrs. Winans, who came down here with your party to help nurse the fever patients, is, or was, Miss Grace Grey of this city--do you know if this is true?" lifting eager, inquiring eyes to his face. "Yes, it is certainly true," and she sees some sort of a change pass over his face--what, she cannot fathom. "Indeed!" she says, in quick surprise and pleasure. "I knew her intimately as a child; we were next-door neighbors"--she nods at the handsome residence standing next to her own, and he looks at it with tender interest--"and afterward we were in boarding-school together. I always liked her so much. Will you give her Stella De Vere's love, and tell her I will come and see her if she will let me?" "I certainly will, with pleasure," and they shake hands and say good-by again, and she runs up the steps of her father's stately home, pausing in the door-way as he turns away. "He _is_ a hero," she says, with a dreamy light in her dark eyes. "How I _could love_ him, if----" She shuts the door, half-sighing, and goes in. For him, he walks away, stopping a moment in front of the next-door house to light a fresh cigar, and glancing at the green grounds, with their graveled paths, goes away with a fancy in his mind of a fairy child with violet eyes and golden curls at play beside the marble fountain under its dashing spray. Grace Grey!