"Perhaps Alice, I have originated a surprise for you; please do not be alarmed if my feelings have overmastered my discretion."
The embarrassed girl essayed quite tactfully to withdraw the attention of her suitor from the subject he was nervously pressing, and pointing to the portrait of a gentleman wearing the stars of a colonel in the Confederate army, she asked him if he recognized her father in the painting.
"Do you know," she remarked without awaiting an answer "that I feel inexpressibly sad when I think of our poor boys who wore the gray in the bloody battles of the South?" and a tiny tear quivered in her soft eye.
"I doubt not," replied the judge in sympathy with her feelings, that the retrospection is extremely painful. "I am sure that I have reason to deplore a catastrophe, that over laid our beloved country as with a shroud."
"You were not a soldier in the Union army?" she suggested interrogatively.
"And could you respect me if I were?" he asked.
"Oh yes," Alice replied without hesitation, "you have been so true to the South in the character of judge I can and do honor you, and I am quite sure if you were a Yankee soldier you believed you were performing your duty."
"My sweet Alice," he exclaimed. "Don't let us have Yankee soldiers in this beautiful Southern home; you don't know how opprobriously the term Yankee sounds to me. I was a Union soldier and fought under the Stars and Stripes, through the bloody battle of Manassas, and can my rebel sweetheart forgive me?" he asked, as he timidly took her soft hand in his own.
"Assuredly sir," she replied "if you will give me your word upon honor, that you never shot our poor boys in the battle; now did you?" she feelingly asked as she looked into his face, aglow with the holy passion of love.
"No," he replied emphatically, "but if I had carried a musket instead of a sword I would have done my duty."