“The—­oath?” asked Ailsa, amazed.

“Certainly.  And I took it,” she added fiercely, “becose of my husband!  If it had not been fo’ Curt I’d have told Mr. Stanton what I thought of his old oath!”

“What kind of an oath was it, Celia?”

Celia repeated it haughtily: 

“’I do solemnly swear, in the presence of Almighty God, to faithfully support the Constitution of the United States, and of the State of New York.  So he’p me God.’”

“It is the oath of fealty,” said Ailsa in a hushed voice.

“It was not necessa’y,” said Celia coldly.  “My husband is sufficient to keep me—­harmless. . . .  But I know what I feel in my heart, Honey-bud; and so does eve’y Southern woman—­God help us all. . . .  Is that little Miss Lynden going with us?”

“Letty?  Yes, of course.”

Celia began to undress.  “She’s a ve’y sweet little minx. . . .  She is—­odd, somehow. . . .  So young—­such a he’pless, cute little thing. . .  Ailsa, in that child’s eyes—­or in her features somewhere, somehow, I see—­I feel a—­a sadness, somehow—­like the gravity of expe’ience, the something that wisdom brings to the ve’y young too early.  It is odd, isn’t it.”

“Letty is a strange, gentle little thing.  I’ve often wondered——­”

“What, Honey-bee?”

“I—­don’t know,” said Ailsa vaguely.  “It is not natural that a happy woman should be so solemnly affectionate to another.  I’ve often thought that she must, sometime or other, have known deep unhappiness.”

When Celia was ready to retire, Ailsa bade her good-night and wandered away down the stairs, Letty was still on duty; she glanced into the sick-diet kitchen as she passed and saw the girl bending over a stew-pan.

She did not disturb her.  With evening a soft melancholy had begun to settle over Ailsa.  It came in the evening, now, often—­a sensation not entirely sad, not unwelcome, soothing her, composing her mind for serious thought, for the sweet sadness of memory.

Always she walked, now, companioned by memories of Berkley.  Wherever she moved—­in the quiet of the sick wards, in the silence of the moonlight, seated by smeared windows watching the beating rain, in the dead house, on duty in the kitchen contriving broths, or stretched among her pillows, always the memories came in troops to bear her company.

They were with her now as she paced the veranda to and fro, to and fro.

She heard Letty singing happily over her stew-pan in the kitchen; the stir and breathing of the vast army was audible all around her in the darkness.  Presently she looked at her watch in the moonlight, returned it to her breast.

“I’m ready, dear,” she said, going to the kitchen door.

And another night on duty was begun—­the last she ever was to spend under the quiet roof of the Farm Hospital.

That night she sat beside the bed of a middle-aged man, a corporal in a Minnesota regiment whose eyes had been shot out on picket.  Otherwise he was convalescent from dysentery.  But Ailsa had seen the convalescent camp, and she would not let him go yet.