“You? Thirty?”
“No, only twenty-four; but your peer in experience.”
“Your voice sounds Southern,” he said in his pleasant voice, inviting confidence.
“Yes; my home was at Sandy River.”
Out of the corners of her eyes she saw him start and look around at her—felt his stern gaze questioning her; and rode straight on before her without response or apparent consciousness.
“Sandy River?” he repeated in a strained voice. “Did you say you lived there?”
“Yes,” indifferently.
The captain rode for a while in silence, then, carelessly: “There was, I believe, a family living there before the war—the Westcotes.”
“Yes.” She could scarcely utter a word for the suffocating throb of her heart.
“You knew them?”