until she became afraid to hear the ring of her doorbell lest it should be the Governor.
She determined to go to Florida for two weeks on a visit to an old schoolmate in Tampa. There, amid the sunshine and the soft breezes from the gulf, she hoped to see her life and duty in clearer outline.
It was the first week in March which found her seated in the centre of a Pullman car of the Florida Limited of the Atlantic Coast Line.
The train had passed Richmond and was sweeping through the desolate broom-sedge fields still furrowed by those mortal trenches around Petersburg.
Her father had been killed in one of those trenches, a gallant colonel cheering a ragged handful of half-starved men in gray, unmindful of the order of retreat until engulfed by the grand army that swept over them like a tidal wave.
She took the children into the dining-car and found every table full except one, and two seats at that one already reserved. Lucy was placed next to the window, Frank next to the aisle, and the mother crowded between them with an arm encircling each.
She had given the order to the waiter, and was pointing out to Lucy the lines of the battle-field on which her father had died.
"There, dear, it is," she said, with a tremor in her voice, pointing to an angle in the trench on the crest of a ridge. "There is where grandfather was killed."
While Lucy looked and Frank climbed into her
