Except the hour spent at Vaughan's each day, and an occasional visit to my mother in town, I am wrapped up in the affairs of Company B. The life here is to me most fascinating. You would laugh to see me with a set of wooden soldiers before me on the little table in my tent, studying manœuvres, extricating my company from the most astounding and unheard-of perplexities. The progress of my lieutenants; the health, morals, and immorals of the company; the incapacity of our bugler to draw the faintest sound from his instrument—in short, everything that indicates growth or decay of discipline in Company B, seems to me a matter of national importance.
One word more about Miss Sybil Vaughan. My mother has seen her, and sympathizes with me. When she came to visit the camp, I took her to Vaughan's house to rest. As we left Holly Farm, she gave a sigh of relief, and said: "Robert, I feel as though I had stepped back half a century. When I was a girl, young ladies were like Miss Sybil Vaughan."
One more last word. In your letter you said, with an air of superior wisdom, plainly expressed in the tails of your letters: "You are in love."
Of course I am, and I should be a fool if I were not.
Your friend,
Robert Adair.
III.
It was June still. The laburnum path was all aglow with blossoms, and the grape-walk, just beyond, made a shadowy retreat toward evening. Sybil was sitting there with her work lying on her lap. She had not sewed three stitches. Why had not Harry come as usual that afternoon to the east window to get his cup of black coffee? Why—O dear! there are so many whys in the case, and never an answer anywhere. Why was there an indefinite air of bustle in the camp as she looked down on it from her bower? Why was there an undefined sense of stir in everything?
She watched the sun drop nearer and nearer to the distant hills. The air was full of saffron light, and heavy with the perfume of flowers. Nature was so new and fresh in her June loveliness; and life was full of a promise of coming beauty, as it had never been before to Sybil in any other of her nineteen Junes. That sense of stir was in her own soul no less than in external nature.
There came the click of an iron heel upon the gravelled path. Sybil half-rose from the bench, and then sank back again. Adair stood before her. "We are ordered off," he said. "We go in an hour. I've but one moment to stay, for I promised Harry to leave him time to come and say good-by."