"Don't fear, mamma; strangers are not favored with my lighter vein; I assume that for you and Jack, to keep your minds from graver things. I preserve the senatorial suavity of speech and the Sprague austerity of manner 'before folks,' as Aunt Merry would say. Which reminds me, Jack, Kitty Moore declares that you are responsible for Barney's enlisting. The family look to you to bring him home safe--a colonel at least."
"Well, by George, I like that! Why, the beggar was bent on going long ago. He was the first to ask me to run away and enlist. The other day he wanted me to have him sworn in, and I told him to wait until--until I got a commission." Jack was going to say until he was older, but he suddenly recollected that Barney was his own age, and that, in view of his mother's argument, struck him as unfortunate. He saw Olympia smiling mischievously and turned the subject abruptly. "I suppose you know, Polly, that Vincent is going home to join the rebels?"
"Is he?" She had turned swiftly to gather a ball of worsted, and when it was secured began to rummage in her work-basket for something that seemed from her intentness to be vitally necessary to her at the moment.
"Yes, he wrote to President Grandison that he should go as soon as his passports and remittances came. He's promised a captain's commission. I'm very, very sorry. Vint is the noblest of fellows. I hate to think of him in the rebel army."
"That's the reason you half killed him the other day, I suppose," Olympia said, sweetly, still investigating the contents of the basket.
"What, John, you've not been in a broil--fighting?" and Mistress Sprague could not, even in imagination, go further in such an odious direction, and let her eyes finish the interrogatory.
Jack, a good deal subdued by what Olympia had left unsaid, rather than what she had said, blurted out: "It was a campus shindy: Vint led the rebel side and they got licked, that's all."
"Oh, was that all?" Olympia had ended her search in the basket and fastened a glance of satiric good humor upon the culprit, which did not tend to relieve the awkwardness of the moment. Jack blushed under the glance and began to hum an air from Figaro, as if the conversation had ebbed into an impass from which it could only be rescued by a lively air.