"I have had a message from some one. She is safe and well and she is grateful." She would add no more, and Prescott did not dare visit her house, watched now with a vigilance that he knew he could not escape; but he wondered often if Lucia Catherwood and he in the heave and drift of the mighty war should ever meet again.
The gossip of Richmond was not allowed to dwell long on the story of the spy, with all its alluring mystery of the man and the maid. Greater events were at hand. A soft wind blew from the South one day. The ice broke up, the snow melted, the wind continued to blow, the earth dried—winter was gone and spring in its green robe was coming. The time of play was over. The armies rose from their sleep in the snows and began to brush the rust from the cannon. Horses stretched themselves and generals studied their maps anew. Three years of tremendous war was gone, but they were prepared for a struggle yet more gigantic.
To those in Richmond able to bear arms was sent an order—"Come at once to the front"—and among them was Prescott, nothing loath. His mother kissed him a tearless good-by, hiding her grief and fear under her Puritan face.
"I feel that this is the end, one way or the other," she said.
"I hope so, mother."
"But it may be long delayed," she added.
To Helen he said a farewell like that of a boy to the girl who has been his playmate. Although she flushed a little, causing him to flush, too, deep tenderness was absent from their parting, and there was a slight constraint that neither could fail to notice.
Talbot was going with him, Wood and Colonel Harley were gone already, and Winthrop and Raymond said they should be at the front to see. Then Prescott bade farewell to Richmond, where in the interval of war he had spent what he now knew to be a golden month or two.