"These poor things belong to one, sir, who, like you, is among the missing. But, oh, thank God! he is missing at the front, in the front."
The abashed craven turned his hand to Flora, but with a gentle promptness Anna stepped between: "No, Flora dear, see; he hasn't a red scratch on him. Oh, sir, go--eat! If hunger stifles courage, eat! But eat as you ride, and ride like mad back to duty and honor! No! not under this roof--nor in sight of these things--can any man be a ladies' man, who is missing from the front, at the rear."
He wheeled and vanished. Anna turned: "Connie, what do your letters say?"
The sister's eyes told enough. The inquirer gazed a moment, then murmured to herself, "I--don't--believe it--yet," grew very white, swayed, and sank with a long sigh into out-thrown arms.
XLVIII
FARRAGUT
The cathedral clock struck ten of the night. Yonder its dial shone, just across that quarter of Jackson Square nearest the Valcours' windows, getting no response this time except the watchman's three taps of his iron-shod club on corner curbstones.
An hour earlier its toll had been answered from near and far, up and down the long, low-roofed, curving and recurving city--"seven, eight, nine"--"eight, nine"--the law's warning to all slaves to be indoors or go to jail. Not Flora nor Anna nor Victorine nor Doctor Sevier nor Dick Smith's lone mother nor any one else among all those thousands of masters, mistresses and man-and maid-servants, or these thousands of home-guards at home under their mosquito-bars, with uniforms on bedside chairs and with muskets and cartridge-belts close by--not one of all these was aware, I say, that however else this awful war might pay its cost, it was the knell of slavery they heard, and which they, themselves, in effect, were sounding.