"To whose being engaged, papa?"
"Miss St. Clair and your friend, - Colonel Somebody. I forget his name, Daisy, though you told me, I believe."
"He was not a colonel, papa; not at all; not near it."
"No. He has been promoted, I understand. Promotions are rapid in the Northern army now-a-days; a lieutenant in the regulars is transformed easily into a colonel of volunteers. They want more officers than they have got, I suppose."
I remained silent, thinking.
"Who told you all this, papa?"
"Your mother. She has it direct from the friend of your rival."
"But, papa, nobody knew about me. It was kept entirely private."
"Not after you came away, I suppose. How else should this story be told as of the gentleman you were engaged to?"
I waited a little while, to get my voice steady, and then I went on with my reading to papa. Once he interrupted me to say, "Daisy, how do you take this that I have been telling you?" - and at the close of our reading he asked again in a perplexed manner, "You do not let it trouble you, Daisy?" - and each time I answered him, "I do not believe it, papa." Neither did I; but at the same time a dreadful shadow of possibility came over my spirit. I could not get from under it, and my soul fainted, as those were said to do who lay down for shelter under the upas tree. A poison as of death seemed to distil upon me from that shadow. Not let it trouble me? It was a man's question, I suppose, put with a man's powerlessness to read a woman's mind; even though the man was my father.