“Yes,” moaned Anna to Constance, when found at dead of night staring Corinthward from a chamber window.  “Yes, friends advise!  All our friends advise!  What daring thing did any one ever do who waited for friends to advise it?  Does your Steve wait for friends to advise?...  Patience?  Ah, lend me yours!  You don’t need it now....  Fortitude?  Oh, I never had any!...  What? command the courage to do nothing when nothing is the only hard thing to do?  Who, I?  Connie!  I don’t even want it.  I’m a craven; I want the easy thing!  I want to go nurse the box-carloads and mule-wagonloads of wounded at Corinth, at Okolona and strewed all the way down to Mobile—­that’s full of them.  Hilary may be somewhere among them—­unidentified!  They say he wore no badge of rank that morning, you know, and carried the carbine of a wounded cavalryman to whom he had given his coat.  Oh, he’s mine, Con, and I’m his.  We’re not engaged, we’re married, and I must go.  It’s only a step—­except in miles—­and I’m going!  I’m going for your sake and Miranda’s.  You know you’re staying on my account, not for me to settle this bazaar business but to wait for news that’s never coming till I go and bring it!”

This tiny, puny, paltry business of the bazaar—­the whereabouts of the dagger and its wealth, or of the detectives, gone for good into military secret service at the front—­she drearily smiled away the whole trivial riddle as she lay of nights contriving new searches for that inestimable, living treasure, whose perpetual “missing,” right yonder “almost in sight from the housetop,” was a dagger in her heart.

And the Valcours?  Yes, they, too, had their frantic impulses to rise and fly.  For Madame, though her lean bosom bled for the lost boy, the fiercest pain of waiting was that its iron coercion lay in their penury.  For Flora its sharpest pangs were in her own rage; a rage not of the earlier, cold sort against Anna and whoever belonged to Anna—­that transport had always been more than half a joy—­but a new, hot rage against herself and the finical cheapness of her scheming, a rage that stabbed her fair complacency with the revelation that she had a heart, and a heart that could ache after another.  The knife of that rage turned in her breast every time she cried to the grandam, “We must go!” and that rapacious torment simpered, “No funds,” adding sidewise hints toward Anna’s jewels, still diligently manoeuvred for, but still somewhere up-stairs in Callender House, sure to go with Anna should Anna go while the manoeuvrers were away.

A long lane to any one, was such waiting, lighted, for Anna, only by a faint reflection of that luster of big generals’ strategy and that invincibility of the Southern heart which, to all New Orleans and even to nations beyond seas, clad Dixie’s every gain in light and hid her gravest disasters in beguiling shadow.  But suddenly one day the long lane turned.  The secret had just leaked out that the forts down the river were furiously engaged with the enemy’s mortar-boats a few miles below them and that in the past forty-eight hours one huge bomb every minute, three thousand in all, had dropped into those forts or burst over them, yet the forts were “proving themselves impregnable.”  The lane turned and there stood Charlie.