"I know—I have heard at least," she stammered, with strange timidity, "that you lost your arm to—to save another man's life! Is it so, Captain Clendenon—did you give your arm for his life?" her dusky eyes kindling with a passionate hero-worship, that is characteristic of Southern women.
"Yes, I gave my arm for his life," he says, grimly. "I might as well have given him my life, for when I buried my left arm on the battle-field at Chancellorsville I buried with it all the hopes that make a man's life worth the living."
"And why?" an unspoken sympathy on her pretty face. "What hopes can there be that your misfortune can possibly destroy?"
They turn a corner into a side street, where her home lies, meeting a group coming toward them, a man with a bright-faced wife clinging to one arm, a little laughing child by the other hand, and two others following after. His glance marks them out a moment, then meets hers, as he quotes, half-sadly:
"'Domestic happiness! thou only bliss
Of Paradise that has survived the fall.'
"Miss De Vere, cannot you suppose that a man getting into the 'sere and yellow leaf'—I am almost six-and-thirty years old—must feel the need of some 'fair spirit for his minister?' And," his glance falling, hers following, on his empty sleeve, "what woman could I ask to give herself to half a man?"
She slackens her pace to look up at him, in genuine honest astonishment.
"Captain Clendenon, you have never been so quixotic, so absurdly chivalrous as to think that any woman would not feel honored to cast her lot with yours in spite of your honorable misfortune—yes, if you had lost both your arms in the army as nobly as you have lost one!"
"Thank you! thank you!" he answers, deeply moved, and seeing the sudden waves of hot color breaking over the warm Southern beauty of her face, he looks blindly away and thinks what a noble-hearted girl she is, and how he has misjudged her in thinking her a fine, fashionable flirt, as all along he had been doing, when he thought of her at all, which was but seldom.
And then they are at the steps of the elegant De Vere mansion, and she gently invites him to enter. He shakes his head.