Finale

Jessie, grown to be a most beautiful girl of nearly sixteen, is still
a child in actions, and wild with delight at seeing her brother again,
throws her arms around his neck, telling, in almost the same breath,
how proud she is of him, how much she wished to go to him when she
heard he was wounded, how she wishes she was a boy, so she could
enlist, how nicely Flora is married and settled down at the cottage in
Honedale, and then asks if he knows aught of the rebel colonel to whom
just before the war broke out her mother was married, and whose home
was in Richmond.

Guy knows nothing of him, except that he is still doing what he deems
his duty in fighting for the Confederacy, but from exchanged
prisoners, who had come up from Richmond, he has heard of a beautiful
lady, an officer's wife, and as rumor said, a Northern woman, who
visited them in prison, speaking kind words of sympathy, and once
binding up a drummer boy's aching head with a handkerchief, which he
still retained, and on whose corner could be faintly traced the name
of "Agnes Remington."

Jessie's eyes are full of tears as she says: "Poor mamma, how glad I am I did not go to Virginia with her. It's
months since I heard from her direct. Of course it was she who was so
good to the drummer boy. She cannot be much of a rebel," and Jessie
glances triumphantly at Mrs. Noah, who, never having quite overcome
her dislike of Agnes, had sorely tried Jessie by declaring that her
mother "had found her level at last, and was just where she wanted to
be."