"Guide right!" he mused alone. "At last, H.K., your nickname's got a meaning worth living up to!"
While he mused, Flora, enraged both for him and against him, and with the rage burning in her eye and on her brow, stood before her seated grandmother, mutely giving gaze for gaze until the elder knew.
The old woman resumed her needle. "And all you have for it," was the first word, "is his pity, eh?"
"Wait!" murmured the girl. "I will win yet, if I have to lose--"
"Yes?" skeptically simpered the grandam, "--have to lose yourself to do it?"
The two gazed again until the maiden quietly nodded and her senior sprang half up:
"No, no! ah, no-no-no! There's a crime awaiting you, but not that! Oh, no, you are no such fool!"
"No?" The girl came near, bent low and with dancing eyes said, "I'll be fool enough to lead him on till his sense of honor--"
"Sense of his honor and _mine_--will make him my prisoner. Or else--!" The speaker's eyes burned. Her bosom rose and fell.
"Yes," said the seated one--to her needle--"or else his sense that Charlie--My God! don't pinch my ear off!"
"Happy thought," laughed Flora, letting go, "but a very poor guess."
For ladies' funerals, we say, mortars and siege-guns, as a rule, do not pause. But here at Vicksburg there was an hour near the end of each day when the foe, for some mercy to themselves, ceased to bombard, and in one of these respites that procession ventured forth in which rode the fevered Anna: a farm wagon, a battered family coach, a carryall or two.
Yet in the midst of the graveyard rites there broke out on the unseen lines near by, northward, an uproar of attack, and one or two shells burst in plain view, frightening the teams. The company leaped into the vehicles any way they could and started townward over a miserable road with the contest resounding on their right. As they jostled along the edge of a wood that lay between them and the firing some mishap to the front team caused all to alight, whereupon a shell, faultily timed, came tearing through the tree-tops and exploded in the remains of a fence close beyond them. Amid thunder, smoke, and brute and human terror the remounting groups whirled away and had entirely left the scene before that was asked which none could tell: Where was Anna?