She nodded.
It was the little rector. He had somehow got it into his head that preachers ought to fight, and this was one of the results. Mary went away quickly, and told Dr. Sevier. The Doctor went to the commanding general. It was a great humiliation to do so, he thought. There was none worse, those days, in the eyes of the people. He craved and got the little man’s release on parole. A fortnight later, as Dr. Sevier was sitting at the breakfast table, with the little rector at its opposite end, he all at once rose to his full attenuated height, with a frown and then a smile, and, tumbling the chair backward behind him, exclaimed:—
“Why, Laura!”—for it was that one of his two gay young nieces who stood in the door-way. The banker’s wife followed in just behind, and was presently saying, with the prettiest heartiness, that Dr. Sevier looked no older than the day they met the Florida general at dinner years before. She had just come in from the Confederacy, smuggling her son of eighteen back to the city, to save him from the conscript officers, and Laura had come with her. And when the clergyman got his crutches into his armpits and stood on one foot, and he and Laura both blushed as they shook hands, the Doctor knew that she had come to nurse her wounded lover. That she might do this without embarrassment, they got married, and were thereupon as vexed with themselves as they could be under the circumstances that they had not done it four or five years before. Of course there was no parade; but Dr. Sevier gave a neat little dinner. Mary and Laura were its designers; Madame Zénobie was the master-builder and made the gumbo. One word about the war, whose smoke was over all the land, would have spoiled the broth. But no such word was spoken.
It happened that the company was almost the same as that which had sat down in brighter days to that other dinner, which the banker’s wife recalled with so much pleasure. She and her husband and son were guests; also that Sister Jane, of whom they had talked, a woman of real goodness and rather unrelieved sweetness; also her sister and bankrupted brother-in-law. The brother-in-law mentioned several persons who, he said, once used to be very cordial to him and his wife, but now did not remember them; and his wife chid him, with the air of a fellow-martyr; but they could not spoil the tender gladness of the occasion.
“Well, Doctor,” said the banker’s wife, looking quite the old lady now, “I suppose your lonely days are over, now that Laura and her husband are to keep house for you.”
“Yes,” said the Doctor.
But the very thought of it made him more lonely than ever.
“It’s a very pleasant and sensible arrangement,” said the lady, looking very practical and confidential; “Laura has told me all about it. It’s just the thing for them and for you.”
“I think so, ma’am,” replied Dr. Sevier, and tried to make his statement good.
“I’m sure of it,” said the lady, very sweetly and gayly, and made a faint time-to-go beckon with a fan to her husband, to whom, in the farther drawing-room, Laura and Mary stood talking, each with an arm about the other’s waist.