"Father!"
"Until we understand that such is the purpose of the war we can get nowhere—accomplish nothing. But there, dear—I didn't mean to say so much. There is always one thing about which there can be no dispute—I love my little girl——"
He slipped his arm about her tenderly again.
"I'm proud of the work you're doing for our soldiers. They tell me in the big hospital that you're an angel. I've always known it, but I'm glad other people are beginning to find it out. In all the horrors of this tragedy there's one ray of sunshine for me—the light that shines from your eyes!"
He bent and kissed her again:
"Run now, and don't miss your boat."
In the five swift days of tender service which followed, Betty Winter forgot her own heartache and loneliness in the pity, pathos, and horror of the scenes she witnessed—the drawn white faces—the charred flesh, the scream of pain from the young, the sigh of brave men, the last messages of love—the gasp and the solemn silences of eternity.
When the strain of the first rush had ended and the time to follow the lines of ambulance wagons back to Washington drew near, the old anguish returned to torture her soul. She told herself it was all over, and yet she knew that somewhere in that vast city of tents, stretching for miles over the hills and valleys about Falmouth Heights, was John Vaughan. She had put him resolutely out of her life. She said this a hundred times—yet she was quietly rejoicing that his name was not on that black roll of seventeen thousand. All doubt had been removed by the announcement in the Republican of his promotion to the rank of Captain for gallantry on the field of Chancellorsville.
She hoped that he had freed himself at last from evil associates. She couldn't be sure—there were ugly rumors flying about the hospital of the use of whiskey in the army. These rumors were particularly busy with Hooker's name.
Seated alone in the quiet moonlight before the field hospital, the balmy air of the South which she drew in deep breaths was bringing back the memory of another now. The pickets had been at their usual friendly tricks of trading tobacco and coffee and exchanging newspapers. From a Richmond paper she had just learned that Ned Vaughan had fought in Lee's army at Chancellorsville. Somewhere beyond the silver mirror of the Rappahannock he was with the men in grey to-night. Her heart in its loneliness went out to him in a wave of tender sympathy. Again she lived over the tragic hours when she had fought the battle for his life and won at last at the risk of her own.