CHAPTER VII
THE COTTAGE IN THE SIDE STREET
Prescott rose the next morning with an uneasy weight upon his mind—the thought of the prisoner whom he had taken the night before. He was unable to imagine how a woman of her manner and presence had ever ventured upon such an enterprise, and he contrasted her—with poor results for the unknown—with Helen Harley, who was to him the personification of all that was delicate and feminine.
After the influence of her eyes, her beauty and her voice was gone, his old belief that she was really the spy and had stolen the papers returned. She had made a fool of him by that pathetic appeal to his mercy and by a simulated appearance of truth. Now in the cold air of the morning he felt a deep chagrin. But the deed was past and could not be undone, and seeking to dismiss it from his mind he went to breakfast.
His mother, as he had expected, asked him nothing about his late absence the night before, but spoke of the reception to General Morgan and the golden haze that it cast over Richmond.
"Have you noticed, Robert," she asked, "that we see complete victory for the South again? I ask you once more how many men did General Morgan bring with him?"
"I don't know exactly, mother. Ten, perhaps."
"And they say that General Grant will have a hundred thousand new troops."