"I do not know," Mrs. Clendenon answers, with sweet seriousness, "that God gives it to us to fathom exactly what are His plans for us. I think He means for us to take proper care of the health and strength He has given us, and to do His will in all things as near as we can, leaving to Him the fulfillment of the grand plan under which, by His fixed laws, every created being is a necessary and responsible agent."
And Grace answers only by silence and sadness. For Captain Clendenon, he has long ceased to argue the question with her willful spirit, having very implicit confidence in the grand old adage that
"When a woman will, she will—you may depend on't!
And when she won't, she won't—and there's an end on't!"
"Oddly enough," he says, trying to change the conversation from its theological turn, "I met with an old comrade to-day—one of the boys from my company—a Virginian, and one of the bravest in the regiment. He had drifted down here since the war."
"What was he doing to-day? Nursing in the hospital?" Mrs. Clendenon asks, curiously.
"Dying in the hospital," the captain answers, with a break in his clear voice. "Down with the fever—died this evening."
"Poor boy!" his mother said, pityingly, and a tear in the younger woman's eye echoed it.
"The worst of it is," the captain goes on, "he leaves a poor, timid little wife, and two rosebuds of children—the mother as childish and fragile as the rest."
"And what is to become of her?" query both ladies at once.
"I want to send her home to her relatives. She was a Richmond girl. I remember meeting her there once when my company passed through on its way to Manassas. Arthur, poor fellow! invited me to call on her. She was then a charming little creature, very different from the heart-broken little thing she is now. Mother, I would like it very much if you would call on her to-morrow, and try to comfort her a little—she seems so friendless and desolate. You, too, Mrs. Winans, if you can conveniently do so."