He smiled upon her indulgently. “Can you think so, Rhoda, you, who understand how we feel and how determined we are?”
She stepped back and proudly lifted her head. Into her face came the look of exaltation he had seen there, in this same arbor, long before. It seemed to remove her far from him, and therefore set his heart to throbbing all the more with longing for her.
“Yes,” she said, “this war will end it, because God is on our side. And afterward—oh, Jeff!”—her face melted to tenderness again—“beyond—after the end, after God has spoken and slavery has been ended, then there will be peace, and for us—” her voice dropped low—“happiness!”
“God be the judge between us, Rhoda Ware,” he exclaimed, “as to which is right! Will you accept His judgment, as He speaks it in battle, and promise to be my wife when the war is over, whatever He has said?”
Again her face was lifted, glowing with exaltation. “God will never allow such an atonement for evil-doing as this war will be,” she said solemnly, “to be crowned by that very evil itself. With faith in Him—I promise!”
Scarcely had the words left her tongue when she found herself swept to his breast and his lips upon her brow, her eyes, her mouth.
“Rhoda, my love, my love,” he whispered, “it is a long good-by that lies before us, perhaps even as long as it has been since I first begged for your love, here among these vines.”
“And there are battles and dangers, oh, so many,” she whispered back, “between now and—the end.”
“But I have a talisman that will carry me safe through it all, to the end—and you. See, my sweet, how long I have kept it!” From an inner pocket he took a little package and showed her a withered rose, the mate of the one she herself so treasured. “I have kept it there, next to my heart, ever since the night you gave it me, for my thoughts, five years ago!”
She looked at it with wondering love, pressed it to her lips and listened with a sweet smile upon them as he said, putting it back again: “It shall lie there always, dear heart, until all my thoughts are yours and yours are mine. And it will always tell me, as plainly as if with your own dear lips, to fight to the uttermost!”