She sat, gentle and upright, in her rosewood chair, her worn silk dress rustling as she crossed her feet, her beautiful hands moving rapidly with the straw plaiting. “I was brought up very carefully, my dear,” she added, turning her head with its shining bands of hair a little silvered since the beginning of the war. “'A girl is like a flower,' your grandpa always said. 'If a rough wind blows near her, her bloom is faded.' Things are different now—very different.”
“But this is war,” said Betty.
Mrs. Ambler nodded over the slender braid.
“Yes, this is war,” she added with her wistful smile, and a moment afterward looked up again to ask in a dazed way:—
“What was the last battle, dear? I can't remember.”
Betty's glance sought the lawn outside where the warm May sunshine fell in shafts of light upon the purple lilacs.
“They are fighting now in the Wilderness,” she answered, her thoughts rushing to the famished army closed in the death grapple with its enemy. “Dan got a letter to me and he says it is like fighting in a jungle, the vines are so thick they can't see the other side. He has to aim by ear instead of sight.”
Mrs. Ambler's fingers moved quickly.
“He has become a very fine man,” she said. “Your father always liked him—and so did I—but at one time we were afraid that he was going to be too much his father's son—he looked so like him on his wild days, especially when he had taken wine and his colour went high.”
“But he has the Lightfoot eyes. The Major, Champe, even their Great-aunt Emmeline have those same gray eyes that are always laughing.”