University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.

When Lucretia awoke next morning, the
faint music of fife and the roll of a distant drum

came floating upon the soft spring breeze, and
as she listened the sounds grew more subdued,
and finally passed out of hearing. She lay absorbed
in thought for many minutes, and then
she sighed and said: “Oh! if he were only
with that band of fellows, how I could love
him!”

In the course of the day a neighbor dropped
in, and when the conversation turned upon the
soldiers, the visitor said:

`Reginald de Whittaker looked rather
down-hearted, and didn't shout when he
marched along with the other boys this morning.
I expect it's owing to you, Miss Loo,
though when I met him coming here yesterday
evening to tell you he'd enlisted, he thought
you'd like it and be proud of— Mercy!
what in the nation's the matter with the girl?”

Nothing, only a sudden misery had fallen
like a blight upon her heart, and a deadly
pallor telegraphed it to her countenance. She
rose up without a word and walked with a
firm step out of the room; but once within the
sacred seclusion of her own chamber, her
strong will gave way and she burst into a flood
of passionate tears. Bitterly she upbraided

herself for her foolish haste of the night before,
and her harsh treatment of her lover at the
very moment that he had come to anticipate the
proudest wish of her heart, and to tell her that
he had enrolled himself under the battle-flag,
and was going forth to fight as her soldier.
Alas! other maidens would have soldiers in
those glorious fields, and be entitled to the
sweet pain of feeling a tender solicitude for
them, but she would be unrepresented. No
soldier in all the vast armies would breathe her
name as he breasted the crimson tide of war!
She wept again—or, rather, she went on weeping
where she left off a moment before. In her
bitterness of spirit she almost cursed the precipitancy
that had brought all this sorrow upon
her young life. “Drat it!” The words were
in her bosom, but she locked them there, and
closed her lips against their utterance.

For weeks she nursed her grief in silence,
while the roses faded from her cheeks. And
through it all she clung to the hope that some
day the old love would bloom again in Reginald's
heart, and he would write to her; but
the long summer days dragged wearily along,
and still no letter came. The newspapers

teemed with stories of battle and carnage, and
eagerly she read them, but always with the
same result: the tears welled up and blurred
the closing lines—the name she sought was
looked for in vain, and the dull aching returned
to her sinking heart. Letters to the other girls
sometimes contained brief mention of him, and
presented always the same picture of him—a
morose, unsmiling, desperate man, always in
the thickest of the fight, begrimed with powder,
and moving calm and unscathed through tempests
of shot and shell, as if he bore a charmed
life.

But at last, in a long list of maimed and
killed, poor Lucretia read these terrible words,
and fell fainting to the floor: “R. D. Whittaker,
private soldier, desperately wounded!”