Will made no direct reply. His thoughts were evidently elsewhere, and after a few minutes he said, hesitatingly:
“Would it break my darling’s heart if I should join Tom at Washington?”
There was a cry of horror, and Rose hid her face in her husband’s bosom.
“Oh, Will, Will, you shan’t, you can’t, you mustn’t and won’t! I didn’t know you ever thought of such a cruel thing. Don’t you love me any more? I’ll try to do better, I certainly will!” and Rose nestled closer to him, holding his hands just as Annie Graham had once held her husband’s.
“You could not be much better, neither could I love you more than I do now, Rosa, darling,” Mr. Mather replied, kissing her childish brow. “But, Rosa, be reasonable once, and listen while I tell you how, ever since the fall of Sumter, I have thought the time would come, when I should be needed, resolving, too, that when it came, it should not find me a second Sardanapalus!”
The sudden lifting of Rose’s head, and her look of perplexed inquiry, showed that notwithstanding the fanciful ornament styled a Diploma lying in her writing-desk, Sardanapalus had not the honor of being numbered among her acquaintances. But her heart was too full to ask an explanation, and her husband continued:
“Besides that, there was a mutual understanding between Tom and myself, that if one went the other would, and he has gone,—nobly laying aside all the party prejudice which for a time influenced his conduct. Our country needs more men.”
“Yes, yes,” gasped Rose; “but more have gone. There’s scarcely a boy left in town, and it’s just so every where.”
Mr. Mather smiled as he replied:
“I know the boys have gone,—boys whose fair, beardless faces should put to shame a strong, full-grown man like me. And another class, too, have gone, our laboring young men, leaving behind them poverty and little helpless children, whereas I have nothing of that kind for an excuse.”