“I should have found it very hard to forgive you if you had staid in the Southern army,” he said, “but as it is we will never mention the subject again.”
Jimmie knew, by the warm pressure of Tom’s hand, that he was forgiven, and with a burden lifted from his mind he was about leaving the room, when Tom, with a preliminary cough, said:
“By the way, Jimmie, who has Rose got here,—what visitor, I mean?” and Tom tried to look vastly indifferent as he buttoned his vest and hung across it the chain made from Mary’s hair.
But the ruse did not succeed. Jimmie knew he had seen Annie, and with a sudden uprising of something undefined he answered in apparent surprise:
“Visitor! what visitor! He must have come to-day, then. Where did you see him?”
“I saw her in here,” Tom replied, and Jimmie laughingly rejoined:
“A pretty place for a her in your quarters! Pray, what was she like?”
“Some like Mary, as she used to be when I first knew her,—a little body dressed in black.”
“With large, handsome, blue eyes?” interrupted Jimmie, while Tom, without suspecting that his brother’s object was to ascertain how closely he had observed the figure in black, replied:
“Yes, very handsome, dreamy eyes.”