“I'm sure he must be dead,” said that lady, one sultry evening in July. Her tone, however, was not one of conviction. A lazy wind from the river stirred the lawn of Virginia's gown. The girl, with her hand on the wicker back of the chair, was watching a storm gather to the eastward, across the Illinois prairie.
“I don't see why you say that, Aunt Lillian,” she replied. “Bad news travels faster than good.”
“And not a word from Comyn. It is cruel of him not to send us a line, telling us where his regiment is.”
Virginia did not reply. She had long since learned that the wisdom of silence was the best for her aunt's unreasonableness. Certainly, if Clarence's letters could not pass the close lines of the Federal troops, news of her father's Texas regiment could not come from Red River.
“How was Judge Whipple to-day?” asked Mrs. Colfax presently.
“Very weak. He doesn't seem to improve much.”
“I can't see why Mrs. Brice,—isn't that her name?—doesn't take him to her house. Yankee women are such prudes.”
Virginia began to rock slowly, and her foot tapped the porch.
“Mrs. Brice has begged the Judge to come to her. But he says he has lived in those rooms, and that he will die there,—when the time comes.”
“How you worship that woman, Virginia! You have become quite a Yankee yourself, I believe, spending whole days with her, nursing that old man.”