The iron muscles about the woman’s mouth began to quiver, and a flush came around her pale-blue eyes.
“There is a long weary stretch between now and then,” she said, turning away her face.
“There is, indeed!” responded Ross, with a sigh, which stirred his bosom with the force of a groan. “A long, weary stretch; full of desolation to more than you and me.”
“It gave him a violent death, and me widowhood like this,” said the woman, turning cold and white.
“The boy told me something of this, but I was not sure it was the same man. I hoped to find him alive and prosperous. This is a hard, hard blow to a man who had so few friends.”
The woman looked at him jealously, as if his evident grief encroached upon her own melancholy right of sorrow. From the first, she seemed to regard him as a person to be kept at arms-length.
“Tell me more—tell me how he died?” said Ross, in a tremulous voice. “It will be a pain, I know; but this suspense and conjecture will have no end, without a thorough knowledge of all that relates to him. I must know.”
Ruth looked wistfully at her mother, and was about to utter some tender protest; but Mrs. Laurence lifted her hand, as if she understood the kind impulse, and was ready to take up her hard task.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE POLICEMAN’S DEATH.
“It was during the Rebellion,” said Mrs. Laurence, “when the laboring-classes of the city went wild with a mad idea that the draft was intended to oppress them and favor the rich. Most of our city troops had been drawn off to check the advance of the enemy, and a fearful duty fell upon the police—as brave a set of men as ever went to any battlefield.