“Yes, sir,” came the answer from the man pacing slowly across the lawn.
“Keep your eye open,” Hal called down. “I’m going to take a look along the roof here.”
Dorothea heard her cousin clamber out of the window and, a moment later, the creaking of the tin as he tiptoed over her head. She held her hand to her heart, tense with excitement, and dreading the outcome. From this move on Hal’s part she argued that the Confederate officers had not yet found their man. Perhaps he had gotten away, after all.
Her rising hope that this was true was confirmed by her cousin who called softly that there was no one on the roof. The girl’s spirits rose with a bound. The man was gone and she was more glad than she would have thought possible. He was an enemy of those with whom her sympathy lay. She still believed in the cause the South was fighting for. Yet for all that she could not help rejoicing that this man had escaped; indeed she felt like dancing. The music in the parlors called her and she turned to go back.
“It’s because they send hounds after them,” she thought to herself, trying to explain her perplexing state of mind. She would have denied with perfect sincerity that she wished the North to win the war, but she could not hide from herself the fact that she had seen things that had dulled the keen edge of her enthusiasm for the Confederate Cause.
As she was about to step through the doorway into the house she ran sharply into April coming out hurriedly. Both girls drew back and for an instant eyed each other in silence.
“I am sorry if you are not having a good time,” April said at length, with a touch of asperity in her tone. “I missed you and was wondering where you were.”
“Oh, but I was enjoying myself,” Dorothea strove to put enthusiasm in her words. “I just came out for a little air.”
April turned to go back into the parlor.
“You seem fond of the porch in the evenings,” she remarked over her shoulder, but there was no accompanying smile and Dorothea felt that a barrier of some sort had sprung up between them. For all that she was not convinced that her cousin’s errand was to seek her. She wondered at once if April knew what was going on upstairs. Perhaps, after all, this beautiful cousin had had a hand in the prisoner’s escape and was coming out to see if all were well. She could not be sure and again felt herself to be in the midst of affairs which she could not explain.