But he starts back, amazed, when the broken, half-intelligible, almost inaudible words reach his ears,
"Paul! Papa—said—you were killed. Oh! he will be so glad!"
And then comes a burst of tears.
Abbot rises to his feet and hurries into the hall. He is bewildered by her words. He feels that it must be some case of mistaken identity, but—how strange a coincidence! Close by the fragments of the phials he finds a door key and the presumable number of her room. Only ten steps away from the little flight of stairs he finds a corresponding door, and, next, an open room. Looking therein, he sees a gentle, matronly woman seated by a bedside, slowly fanning some recumbent invalid. She puts her fingers on her lips, warningly, as she sees the uniform at her door.
"Do not wake him, it is the first sound sleep he has had for days," she says. "Is this the army doctor?"
"No," he whispers, "a young lady has just fainted down in the next corridor. Her room adjoins this. Do you know her?"
"Oh, Heaven! I might have known it. Poor child, she is utterly worn out. This is her father. Will you stay here just a few moments? His son was a soldier, too, and was killed—and so was her lover—and it has nearly killed the poor old gentleman. I'll go at once."
Still puzzling over his strange adventure, and thinking only of the sweet face of the fainting girl, Abbot mechanically takes the fan the nurse has resigned and slowly sweeps the circling flies away. The invalid lies on his right side with his face to the wall; but the soft, curling gray hair ripples under the waves of air stirred by the languid movement of the fan. The features have not yet attracted his attention. He is listening intently for sounds from the corridor. His thoughts are with the girl who has so strangely moved him; so strangely called his name and looked up into his eyes with a sweet light of recognition in hers—with a wild thrill of delight and hope in them, unless all signs deceive him. The color, too, that was rushing into her face, the sudden storm of emotion that bursts in tears; what meant all this—all this in a girl whom never before had he seen in all his life? Verily, strange experiences were these he was going through. Only a week or so before had not that gray-haired old doctor shown almost as deep an emotion on meeting him at Frederick? And was he not prostrated when assured of his mistake, and was it not hard to convince him that the letters to which he persistently referred were forgeries? Some scoundrel who claimed to know his son was striving to bleed him for money, probably, and using, of all others, the name of Paul Abbot. And this poor old gentleman here had also lost a son, and the sweet, fragile-looking girl a lover! How peacefully the old man sleeps, thinks Abbot, as he glances a moment around the room. There are flowers on the table near the open window; books, too, which, perhaps, she had tried to read aloud. The window opens out over Pennsylvania Avenue, and the hum and bustle of thronging life comes floating up from below; a roar of drums is growing louder every minute, and presently bursts upon the ear as though, just issuing from a neighboring street, the drummers were marching forth upon the avenue. Abbot glances at his patient, fearful lest the noise should wake him, but he sleeps the sleep of exhausted nature, and the soldier in his temporary nurse prompts him to steal to the window and look down upon the troops. They are marching south, along Fourteenth Street—a regiment going over to the fortifications beyond the Long Bridge, and, after a glance, Abbot steps quickly back. On the table nearest the window lies a dainty writing-case, a woman's, and the flap is down on a half-finished letter. On the letter, half disclosed, is the photograph of an officer. It is strangely familiar as Abbot steps towards it. Then—the roar of the drums seems deafening; the walls of the little room seem turning upside down; his brain is in some strange and sudden whirl; but there in his hands he holds, beyond all question—his own picture—a photograph by Brady, taken when he was in Washington during the previous summer. He has not recovered his senses when there is an uneasy movement at the bed. The gray-haired patient turns wearily and throws himself on the other side, and now, though haggard and worn with suffering, there is no forgetting that sorrow-stricken old face. In an instant Major Abbot has recognized his visitor of the week before. There before him lies Doctor Warren. Who—who then is she?