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“I hope you are satisfied,” he said, sternly. “I make but one request of you–that from this time forth, you will never mention the name of Drayton to me again as long as you live.”

“I suppose I should hate her,” said the son, bitterly, “but I do not. I love her and I believe she cares for me.”

His father turned in the door-way and faced him.

“Cares for you! Not so much as she cares for the smallest negro on that place. If you ever marry her, I will disinherit you.”

“Disinherit me!” burst from the young man. “Do you think I care for this place? What has it ever brought to us but unhappiness? I have seen your life embittered by a feud with your nearest neighbor, and now it wrecks my happiness and robs me of what I would give all the rest of the world for.”

Judge Hampden looked at him curiously. He started to say, “Before I would let her enter this house, I would burn it with my own hands”; but as he met his son’s steadfast gaze there was that in it which made him pause. The Hampden look was in his eyes. The father knew that another word might sever them forever.

*****

If ever a man tried to court death, young Oliver Hampden did. But Death, that struck many a happier man, passed him by, and he secured instead only a reputation for reckless courage and was promoted on the field.

His father rose to the command of a brigade, and Oliver himself became a captain.

At last the bullet Oliver had sought found him; but it spared his life and only incapacitated him for service.

There were no trained nurses during the war, and Lucy Drayton, like so many girls, when the war grew fiercer, went into the hospitals, and by devotion supplied their place.

Believing that life was ended for her, she had devoted herself wholly to the cause, and self-repression had given to her face the gentleness and consecration of a nun.

It was said that once as she bent over a wounded common soldier, he returned to consciousness, and after gazing up at her a moment, asked vaguely, “Who are you, Miss?”

“I am one of the sisters whom our Father has sent to nurse you and help you to get well. But you must not talk.”

The wounded man closed his eyes and then opened them with a faint smile.

“All right; just one word. Will you please ask your pa if I may be his son-in-law?”

Into the hospital was brought one day a soldier so broken and bandaged that no one but Lucy Drayton might have recognized Oliver Hampden.

For a long time his life was despaired of; but he survived.

When consciousness returned to him, the first sound he heard was a voice which had often haunted him in his dreams, but which he had never expected to hear again.

“Who is that!” he asked, feebly.

“It is I, Oliver–it is Lucy.”

The wounded man moved slightly and the girl bending over him caught the words, whispered brokenly to himself:

“I am dreaming.”

But he was not dreaming.

Lucy Drayton’s devotion probably brought him back from death and saved his life.

In the hell of that hospital one man at least found the balm for his wounds. When he knew how broken he was he offered Lucy her release. Her reply was in the words of the English girl to the wounded Napier, “If there is enough of you left to hold your soul, I will marry you.”

As soon as he was sufficiently convalescent, they were married.

Lucy insisted that General Hampden should be informed, but the young man knew his father’s bitterness, and refused. He relied on securing his consent later, and Lucy, fearing for her patient’s life, and having secured her own father’s consent, yielded.

It was a mistake.

Oliver Hampden misjudged the depth of his father’s feeling, and General Hampden was mortally offended by his having married without informing him.