Jessie’s eyes are full of tears as she says:
“Dear mamma. It’s months since I heard from her direct. Of course it was she who was so good to the drummer boy. She cannot be so very bad,” and Jessie glances triumphantly at Mrs. Noah, who, never having quite overcome her dislike of Agnes, had sorely tried Jessie by declaring that her mother “had found her level at last, and was just where she wanted to be.”
Good Mrs. Noah! The ancient man, whose name she bore, would as soon have thought of leaving the Ark, as she of turning traitor to her country, and when she heard of the riotous mob raised against the draft, she talked seriously of going in person to New York “to give ’em a piece of her mind,” and for one whole day refused to speak to Flora’s husband, because he was a “dum dimocrat,” and she presumed wanted the south to beat. With the exception of Maddy, no one was more pleased to see Guy than herself. He was her boy, the one she brought up, and with a mother’s fervor she kissed his bronzed cheek, and told him how glad she was to have him back.
With his boy on his sound arm, Guy disengaged himself from the noisy group and went with Maddy to where the child he had never seen was just beginning to show signs of resentment at being left so long alone.
“Lulu, sissy, papa’s come; this is papa,” the little boy cried, assuming the honor of the introduction.
Lulu, as they called her, was not afraid of the tall soldier, and stretching out her fat, white hands, went to him readily. Blue-eyed and golden-haired, she bore but little resemblance to either father or mother, but there was a sweet, beautiful face, of which Maddy had often dreamed, but never seen, and whether it were fancy or not, Guy thought it beamed upon him again in the infantile features of his little girl. Parting lovingly her yellow curls and kissing her fair cheek, he said to Maddy softly, just as he always spoke of that dead one:
“Yes, darling, Margaret Holbrook is right—our baby daughter is very much like our dear lost Lucy Atherstone.”
THE END.
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