The close of a calm September afternoon, and the autumnal sunlight

falls softly upon Aikenside, where a gay party is now assembled. For

four years Maddy Clyde has been mistress there, and in looking back

upon them she wonders how so much happiness as she has known could be

experienced in so short a time. Never but once has the slightest

ripple of sorrow shadowed her heart, and that was when her noble

husband, Guy, said to her, in a voice she knew was earnest and

determined that he could no longer remain deaf to his country's

call--that where the battle storm was raging he was needed, and like a

second Sardanapalus he must not stay at home. Then for a brief season

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her bright face was overcast, and her brown eyes dim with weeping.

Giving him to the war seemed like giving him up to death. But women

can be as true heroes as men. Indeed, it oftentimes costs more courage

for a weak, confiding woman to bid her loved ones leave her for the

field of carnage than it costs them to face the cannon's mouth. Maddy

found it so, but Christian patriotism triumphed over all, and stifling

her own grief, she sent him away with smiles, and prayers, and

cheering words of encouragement, turning herself for consolation to

the source from which she never sued for peace in vain. Save that she

missed her husband terribly, she was not lonely, for her beautiful

dark-eyed boy, whom they called Guy, Jr., kept her busy, while not

very many weeks afterward, Guy, Sr., sitting in his tent, read with

moistened eyes of a little golden-haired daughter, whom Maddy named

Lucy Atherstone, and gazed upon a curl of hair she inclosed to the

soldier father, asking if it were not like some other hair now

moldering back to dust within an English churchyard. "Maggie" said it

was, Aunt Maggie, as Guy, Jr., called the wife of Dr. Holbrook, who

had come to Aikenside to stay, while her husband did his duty as

surgeon in the army. That little daughter is a year-old baby now, and

in her short white dress and coral bracelets she sits neglected on the

nursery floor, while mother and Jessie, Maggie and everybody hasten

out into the yard to welcome the returning soldier, Major Guy, whose

arm is in a sling, and whose face is very pale from the effects of

wounds received at Gettysburg, where his daring courage had well-nigh

won for Maddy a widow's heritage. For the present the arm is disabled,

and so he has been discharged, and comes back to the home where warm

words of welcome greet him, from the lowest servant up to his darling

wife, who can only look her joy as he folds her in his well arm, and

kisses her beautiful face. Only Margaret Holbrook seems a little sad,

she had so wanted her husband to come with Guy, but his humanity would

not permit him to leave the suffering beings who needed his care.

Loving messages he sent to her, and her tears were dried when she

heard from Guy how greatly he was beloved by the pale occupants of the

beds of pain, and how much he was doing to relieve their anguish.




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