“What do you mean?  What do you know?” Hugh asked, a little haughtily, while Sam fearlessly replied: 

“’Scuse me, massah, but I hears dem dis mornin’—­hears de city chap sparkin’ Miss Ellis, and seen his arm spang round her, too, with her sweet face, white as wool, lyin’ in his buzzum.”

“You saw this after I was gone?” Hugh asked, eagerly, and Sam replied: 

“Yes, massah, strue as preachin’, and I’se sorry for massah.  I prays that he may somewhar find anodder Miss Ellis, only not quite so nice, ’cause he can’t.”

Hugh smiled bitterly, as he rejoined: 

“Pray rather that I may find Adah, that is the object now for which I live; and, Sam, keep what you have seen to yourself.  Be faithful to Miss Johnson and kind to mother.  There’s no telling when I shall return.  I may join the Federal Army, but not a word of this to any one.”

“Oh, massah,” Sam began, but Hugh left him ere he finished, and compelled himself to join the group on the front side of the building, startling them as he had Sam by announcing his determination to start on the morrow for New York.

Alice’s exclamation of surprise was lost as Irving rejoined: 

“Then we may travel together, as I, too, leave in the morning.”

Hugh gave him a rapid, searching glance, and then his eye fell on Alice, whose white face he jealously fancied was caused by the prospect of parting so soon with her affianced husband.  He could not guess whether she were going to Europe or not.  A few weeks seemed so short a time in which to prepare, that he half believed she might induce Mr. Stanley to defer the trip till autumn.  But he would not ask.  She would surely tell him at the last, he thought.  She ought, at least, to trust him as a brother, and say to him: 

“Hugh, I am engaged to Mr. Stanley, and when you return, if you are long gone, I shall probably not be here.”

But she said to him no such thing, and only the whiteness of her face and the occasional quivering of her long eyelashes, showed that she felt at all, as at an early hour next morning she presided at the breakfast prepared for the travelers.  There was no tremor in her voice, no hesitancy in her manner, and a stranger could not have told which of the young men before her held her heart in his possession, or which had kept her wakeful the entire night, revolving the propriety of telling him ere he left that the Golden Hair he loved so much was willing to be his.

“Perhaps he will speak to me.  I’ll wait,” was the final decision, as, rising from her sleepless pillow, she sat down in the gray dawn of the morning and penned a hasty note, which she thrust into his hand at parting, little dreaming how long a time would intervene ere they would meet again.

He had not said to her or to his mother that he might join the army, gathering so fast from every Northern city and hamlet; only Sam knew this, and so the mother longing for her daughter was pleased rather than surprised at his abrupt departure, bidding him Godspeed, and lading him with messages of love for Adah and the little boy.  Alice, too, tried to smile as she said good-by, but it died upon her lips and a tear trembled on her cheek, when Hugh dropped the little hand he never expected to hold again just as he held it then.