"Why did you
not tell me? I am so sorry! I beg your pardon."
"No," I answered quietly, "we Quakers never wish to intrude our own
griefs, or make any show of them. I should have told you, but there were
many other things that prevented for the time." Then, briefly, I
reviewed the happenings that had led to my journey into the West. Her
sympathy was sweet to me.
"So now, you see, I ought indeed to return," I concluded, "but I can
not. We shall be at Laramie now very soon. After that errand I shall go
back to Virginia."
"And that will be your home?"
"Yes," I said bitterly. "I shall settle down and become a staid old
farmer. I shall be utterly cheerless."
"You must not speak so. You are young."
"But you," I ventured, "will always live with the Army?"
"Why, our home is in Virginia, too, over in old Albemarle, though we
don't often see it. I have been West since I came out of school, pretty
much all the time, and unless there should be a war I suppose I shall
stay always out here with my father. My mother died when I was very
young."
"And you will never come back to quiet old Virginia, where plodding
farmers go on as their fathers did a hundred years ago?"
She made no immediate answer, and when she did, apparently mused on
other things.
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