"Well, we will not mind the milk." Aunt Lizzie put the cup on the table, and brushed out her long fair hair and tied it up with her purple ribbon. She bathed her face with warm water from the sauce-pan on the stove, and the pinafore was already half over her head, when the door opened and John came in.
"Aunt Lizzie, is it father? Tell him, tell him quickly," cried Violet in a sudden tremor. "Violet cannot be a soldier unless thou tellest him first what I said to thee."
Lizzie turned from the bed, leaving the pinafore still over the child's face. John was already half-way across the room, and there was such a look of questioning anguish in his gaze as it met hers that she could scarcely frame the words of poor Violet's request. She whispered, however, something in his ear, which after a second's thought he readily understood; and stepping over towards the bed, he waited until Lizzie drew the pinafore down from his little girl's face, gazing at her with the expression in his eyes of one who waits with a speechless pain and dread to look on the features of the dead.
But what was this! When the face was uncovered there was a smile, an actual smile on her lips, and one which grew with the mounting colour in her cheeks as she stretched up her arms quickly and said in a hurried whisper, "Father, Violet has been waiting for thee."
"Yes, darling, I am somewhat late, but it was with difficulty I could push my way up here through the streets. I thought at one time I should hardly have been able to force my way through them at all, and that I should have been forced to say 'Good-bye' from the street."
"From the street?" cried Aunt Lizzie and Violet in one breath.
"Yes; the colonel has decided that we are to march through the Market-place and then down by the fountain and along past these windows to the station."
"And I shall see thee again, father?"
"Yes, my darling."