You have seen a tortoise suddenly draw back into his shell. Well, George as suddenly retreated into his. For an instant he looked at the Southron as one might at a confessed murderer; then stammered out a few random and unmeaning words about mistaken sense of duty—gallant but useless struggle, you know—drew a newspaper from his pocket, and hid his confusion behind it.
Fearing my fiery Kentuckian might let fall some unlucky word that would act like a live coal dropped on the tortoise’s back, I hastened to interpose. “But really, colonel,” I urged, returning to the charge, “with the Blue Ridge always at your back, I wager you did not come a thousand miles merely to see our mountains. Come, what takes you from Lexington?”
“A truant disposition.”
“Nothing else?”
His dark face grew swarthy, then pale. He looked at me doubtfully a moment, and then leaned close to my ear. “You guessed it,” he whispered.
“A woman?”
“Yes; you know that I was taken prisoner and sent North. Through the influence of a friend who had known my family before the war, I was allowed to pass my first days of convalescence in a beautiful little village in Berkshire. There I was cured of the bullet, but received a more mortal wound.”
“What a misfortune!”
“Yes; no; confound you, let me finish.”
“Helen, the daughter of the gentleman who procured my transfer from the hospital to his pleasant home” (the proud Southerner would not say his benefactor), “was a beautiful creature. Let me describe her to you.”