We turned and drove back up the shady street, Ellen and I. I saw her fingers twisting together in her lap, but as yet she had not spoken. The flush on her cheek was deeper now. She beat her hands together softly, confused, half frightened; but she did not beg me to leave her.
"If you could get away," she began at last, "I would ask you to drive me back home. Aunt Mandy and I are living there together. Kitty Stevenson's visiting me--you'll--you'll want to call on Kitty. My father has been in East Kentucky, but I understand he's ordered here this week. Major Stevenson is with him. We thought we might get word, and so came on through the lines."
"You had no right to do so. The pickets should have stopped you," I said. "At the same time, I am very glad they didn't."
"So you are a Colonel," she said after a time, with an Army girl's nice reading of insignia.
"Yes," I answered, "I am an officer. Now if I could only be a gentleman!"
"Don't!" she whispered. "Don't talk in that way, please."
"I think you have been," she whispered, all her face rosy now.
We were now near the line of our own pickets on this edge of the town. Making myself known, I passed through and drove out into the country roads, along the edge of the hills, now glorious in their autumn hues. It was a scene fair as Paradise to me. Presently Ellen pointed to a mansion house on a far off hill--such a house as can be found nowhere in America but in this very valley; an old family seat, lying, reserved and full of dignity, at a hilltop shielded with great oaks. I bethought me again of the cities of peace I had seen on the far horizons of another land than this.
"That is our home," she said. "We have not often been here since grandfather died, and then my mother. But this is the place that we Meriwethers all call home."
Then I saw again what appeal the profession of arms makes to a man--how strong is its fascination. It had taken the master of a home like this from a life like this, and plunged him into the hardships and dangers of frontier war, again into the still more difficult and dangerous conflicts between great armies. Not for months, for years, had he set foot on his own sod--sod like ours in Loudoun, never broken by a plow.