"The terrified Dolores was hastening down stairs to see them, when a voice which she had not heard for eighteen years sang a gay French chanson, which she last had heard from Ladislaus Schmolnitz, on the pretty banks of Theiss.
"Friends, this wretched woman recognized that voice as belonging to her once loved little tailor.
"Ah! her heart was not dead after all, it stirred in its long death-sleep, and thrilled with joy. Oh, Heaven! why is love so deathless in a woman's breast when it is ever her curse, her ruin?
"Well, she fled to her room again, and disguised herself as well as she could, for she yearned to meet her renegade husband, and to converse with him unsuspected. She did so. She concealed her pretty figure with clumsy padding, she browned her white face, she covered her yellow hair with a wig, and entering, she bowed low to her renegade husband and spoke only French, which he had never before heard her speak.
"But he could not feel at ease, he gazed suspiciously again and again at her, her eyes recalled the old love story by the banks of the Theiss—he feared the French madame of middle age.
"What her emotions were, it is scarce worth telling. She was happy to know that he was alive, she exulted that she had seen him, but she was bound to the kind planter and feared to betray herself to Schmolnitz, she let him go, not intending to reveal herself.
"But, at the moment of parting, a volley of shot was fired at the front of the mansion by some Confederate troops, who had surprised the encampment, and a cannon ball crashed in the doorway, almost in the midst of the little group in the hall.
"Dolores was startled out of her disguise and clung madly to the little tailor, crying out that she was his Dolores, and that she loved him still.
"Simple idiot! when she could live in palaces if she chose!
"Dear friends, that abject little tailor had the brutality to shake her off, to swear at her; to protest that he had suspected as much, and to fling her from him in a dead faint in the hall and escape with his comrade.