hoarsely.

"Oh, do let me cry," she wailed. "It was so hard for me to hold back all the time we were at table. I must cry, or my heart will break. Oh, my own dear Phil, what if I should never see you again! Oh! Oh!"

"Nonsense, darling," he said, crowding down the lump that seemed like iron in his throat, and making a desperate effort to keep his voice steady. "You will see me again, never doubt it. Don't I tell you I am coming back? The South cannot hold out much longer. Everybody says so. I shall be home in a year, and then you will be my wife, to be God's Grace to me all the rest of my life. Our happiness will be on interest till then; ten per cent, a month at least, compound interest, piling up every day. Just think of that, dear; don't let yourself think of anything else."

"Oh, Phil, how I love you!" she cried, throwing her arms around his neck in a passion of tenderness. "Nobody is like you. Nobody ever was. Surely God will not part us. Surely He will not. He is too good."

"No, dear, He will not. Some day I shall come back. It will not be long. Perhaps I shall find you waiting for me in this same little summer-house. Let us think of that. It was here, you know, we found out each other's secret that day."

"I had found out yours long before," she said, faintly smiling.

"Time 's up, Phil." It was Mr. Morton's voice calling to them from the piazza.

"I must go, darling. Good-by."

"Oh, no, not yet; not quite yet," she wailed, clinging to him. "Why, we have been here but a few moments. It can't be ten minutes yet."

Under the influence of that close, passionate embrace, those clinging kisses and mingling tears, there began to come over Philip a feeling of weakness, of fainting courage, a disposition to cry out, "Nothing can be so terrible as this. I will not bear it; I will not go." By a tyrannical effort of will, against which his whole nature cried out, he unwound her arms from his neck and said in a choked voice:—

"Darling, this is harder than any battle I shall have to fight, but this is what I enlisted for. I must go."

He had reached the door of the summer-house, not daring for honor's sake to look back, when a heartbroken cry smote his ear.

"You have n't kissed me good-by!"

He had kissed her a hundred times, but these kisses she apparently distinguished from the good-by kiss. He came back, and taking her again in his embrace, kissed her lips, her throat, her bosom, and then once more their lips met, and in that kiss of parting which plucks the heart up by the roots.

How strong must be the barrier between one soul and another that they do not utterly merge in moments like that, turning the agony of parting to the bliss of blended being!

Pursued by the sound of her desolate sobbing, he fled away.

The stable-boy held the dancing horse at the gate, and Mr. Morton and his sister stood waiting there.

"Good-by, Phil, till we see you again," said Miss Morton, kissing him tenderly. "We 'll take good care of her for you."

"Will you please go to her now?" he said huskily. "She is in the summer-house. For God's sake try to comfort her."

"Yes, poor boy, I will," she answered. He shook hands with Mr. Morton and jumped into the buggy.

"I 'll get a furlough and be back in a few months, maybe. Be sure to tell her that," he said.

The stable-boy stood aside; the mettlesome horse gave a plunge and started off at a three-minute gait. The boy drew out his watch and observed: "He hain't got but fifteen minutes to git to camp in, but he 'll do it. The mare 's a stepper, and Phil King knows how to handle the ribbons."

The buggy vanished in a cloud of dust around the next turn in the road. The stable-boy strode whistling down the street, the minister went to his study, and Miss Morton disappeared in the shrubbery in the direction of the summer-house.

II

Early