At last, as the frosty days of October came on, they began to hope he might be exchanged, and Helen's face grew bright again, until one day there came a soiled, half-worn letter, in Mark's own handwriting. It was the first word received from him since his capture in July, and with a cry of joy Helen snatched it from Uncle Ephraim, for she was still at the farmhouse, and sitting down upon the doorstep just where she had been standing, read the words which Mark had sent to her. He said nothing of the treatment he received, for he wanted the letter to reach her, and he knew well that if he complained the chances were small for the missive ever to leave the capital of the "chivalry." He was very well, he said, and had been all the time, but he pined for home, longing for the dear girl-wife never so dear as now, when separated by so many miles, with prison walls on every side, and an enemy's line between them.
"But be of good cheer, darling," he wrote. "I shall come back to you some time, and life will he all the brighter for what you suffer now. I am so glad my darling consented to be my wife, even though I could stay with her but a moment. The knowing you are really mine makes me happy even here, for I think of you by day, and in my dreams I always hold you in my arms and press you to my heart."
Far different from this cheerful letter was the one which Tom inclosed in it for his family--a wild, homesick outburst, containing so much of truth that it was strange it was ever permitted to leave the city. Of this letter Helen heard by way of Mattie Tubbs, and hope died within her, especially as Tom spoke of their being sent further South as a probable event.
"If Mark goes I shall never see him again," Helen said, despairingly; and when at last the message came that Mark had been removed, and that, too, just at the time when an exchange was constantly expected, she gave him up as lost, feeling almost as much widowed as Katy in her weeds.
Slowly the winter passed away, and the country was rife with stories of the inhuman treatment of our men, daily dying by hundreds, while those who survived the cruelties were reduced to maniacs and imbeciles. And Helen, as she listened, grew nearly frantic with the sickening suspense. She did not know now where her husband was. He had made several attempts to escape, and with each failure had been removed to safer quarters, so that the chances now of his being exchanged seemed very far away. Week after week, month after month, passed on, until came the memorable battle of the Wilderness, when Lieutenant Bob, as yet unharmed, stood bravely in the thickest of the fight, his tall figure towering above the rest, and his soldier's uniform buttoned over a dark tress of hair, and a face like Bell Cameron's, Lieutenant Bob had taken two or three furloughs, but the one which had left the sweetest, pleasantest memory in his heart was that of the autumn before, when the crimson leaves of the maple and the golden tints of the beech were burning themselves out on the hills of Silverton, where his furlough was mostly passed, and where, with Bell Cameron, he scoured the length and breadth of Uncle Ephraim's farm, now stopping by the shore of Fairy Pond and again sitting for hours on a ledge of rocks far up the hill, where, beneath the softly-whispering pines nodding above their heads, Bell gathered the light brown cones, and said to him the words he had so thirsted to hear: "I love you, Robert Reynolds."