"If I say yes, Morris, you will not think that I never loved Wilford, for I did, oh yes, I did. Not exactly as I supposed I might, even then, have loved you, had you asked me first, but I loved him, and I was happy with him, or if there were little clouds, his dying swept them all away."
Katy was proving herself a true woman, who remembered only the good there was in Wilford, and Morris did not love her less for it. She was all the dearer to him, all the more desirable. Once he told her so, winding his arms about her, and resting her head upon his shoulder, where it lay just as it had never lain before, for with the first kiss Morris gave her, calling her "My own little Katy," she felt stealing over her the same indescribable peace she had always felt with him, intensified now, and sweeter from the knowing it would remain if she should will it so. And she did will it so, kissing Morris back when he asked her to, and thus sealing the compact of her second betrothal. It was not exactly like the first. There was no tumultuous emotions, or ecstatic joys, but Katy felt in her inmost heart that she was happier now than then, that between herself and Morris there was more affinity than there had been between herself and Wilford, and as she looked back over the road she had come, and remembered all Morris had been to her, she wondered at her blindness in not recognizing and responding to the love in which she had now found shelter.
It was very late that night when Katy crept up to bed, and Helen, who was not asleep, knew by the face on which the lamplight fell, as Katy sat for a moment in thoughtful mood, looking out into the darkness, that Morris had not sued in vain. Aunt Betsy knew it, too, next morning, by the same look on Katy's face, when she came downstairs, but this did not prevent her saying, abruptly, as Katy stood by the sink:
"Be you two engaged?"
"We are," was Katy's frank reply, which brought back all Aunt Betsy's visions of roasted fowls and frosted cake, and maybe a dance in the kitchen, to say nothing of the feather bed which she had not dared to offer Katy Cameron, but which she thought would come in play for "Miss Dr. Grant."
CHAPTER LIII.
THE PRISONERS.
Many of the captives were coming home. Prison after prison had given up its starving, vermin-eaten inmates, while all along the Northern lines loving hearts were waiting, and friendly hands outstretched to welcome them back to "God's land," as the poor, suffering creatures termed the soil over which waved the Stars and Stripes, for which they had fought so bravely. Wistfully, thousands of eyes ran over the long columns of names of those returned, each eye seeking for its own, and growing dim with tears as it failed to find it, or lighting up with untold joy when it was found.
"Lieutenant Robert Reynolds" and "Thomas Tubbs," Helen read among the list of those just arrived at Annapolis, but "Captain Mark Ray" was not there, and with a sickening feeling of disappointment she passed the paper to her mother-in-law, and hastened away, to weep and pray that what she so greatly feared might not come upon her.