"Aw-dinner-illy," she said, a flag-of-truce craft might be any old tub and would go the short way, from behind the city and across the lakes, not all round by the river and the Chandeleur Islands. But this time--that very morning--a score or so of Confederate prisoners (officers, for exchange) had been put aboard that boat, bound for Mobile. Plainly the whole affair was but a mask for reconnaissance, the boat, swiftest in all the Gulf, to report back at top speed by way of the lakes. But!--the aunt would not go at all! Never having been a mile from her door, she was begging off in a palsy of fright, and here was the niece with a deep plot--ample source of her ecstasy--a plot for Anna, duly disguised, to go in the aunt's place, back to freedom, Dixie, and the arms of Constance and Miranda.
Anna trembled. She could lovingly call the fond schemer, over and over, a brave, rash, generous little heroine and lay caresses on her twice and again, but to know whether this was Heaven's leading was beyond her. She paced the room. She clasped her brow. A full half of her own great purpose (great to her at least) seemed all at once as good as achieved, yet it was but the second half, as useless without the first as half a bridge on the far side of the flood. "I cannot go!" she moaned. For the first half was Hilary, and he--she saw it without asking--was on this cartel of exchange.
Gently she came and took her rescuer's hands: "Dear child! If--if while there was yet time--I had only got a certain word to--him--you know? But, ah, me! I keep it idle yet; a secret, Victorine, a secret worth our three lives! oh, three times three hundred lives! Even now--"
"Give it me, Anna! Give it! Give it me, that sick-rate! I'll take it him!"
Anna shook her head: "Ah, if you could--in time! Or even--even without him, letting him go, if just you and I--Come!" They walked to and fro in embrace: "Dear, our front drawing-room, so ruined, you know, by that shell, last year--"
"Ah, the front? no! The behine, yes, with those two hole' of the shell and with thad beegue hole in the floor where it cadge fiah."
"Victorine, I could go--with you--in that boat, if only I could be for one minute in that old empty front room alone."
Victorine halted and sadly tossed a hand: "Ah! h-amptee, yes, both the front and the back--till yes-the-day! This morning, the front, no! Juz' sinze laz' week they 'ave brick' up bitwin them cloze by that burned hole, to make of the front an office, and now the front 't is o'cupy!"
"Oh, not as an office, I hope?"
"Worse! The worse that can be! They 'ave stop' five prisoner' from the boat and put them yondeh. Since an hour Col-on-el Grinleaf he tol' me that--and she's ad the bottom, that Flora! Bicause--" The speaker gazed. Anna was all joy.