"Where is your other cousin?" said Mrs. Plumfield, abruptly.
"Marion? she is in England, I believe we don't hear from her very often."
"No, no I mean the one who is in the army?"
"Charlton! Oh, he is just ordered off to Mexico," said
Fleda, sadly, "and that is another great trouble to aunt Lucy.
This miserable war!"
"Does he never come home?"
"Only once since we came from Paris while we were in New
York. He has been stationed away off at the West."
"He has a captain's pay now, hasn't he?"
"Yes, but he doesn't know at all how things are at home; he hasn't an idea of it and he will not have. Well, good-bye, dear aunt Miriam I must run home to take care of my chicken."
She ran away; and if her eyes many a time on the way down the hill filled and overflowed, they were not bitter nor dark tears; they were the gushings of high and pure and generous affections, weeping for fullness, not for want.
That chicken was not wasted in soup; it was converted into the nicest possible little fricassee, because the toast would make so much more of it; and to Fleda's own dinner, little went beside the toast, that a greater portion of the rest might be for her aunt and Hugh.