I add my entreaties to hers.

She begs of me to beseech you not to try her by any further appeals, as she will but return them unopened." That was all.
What could it mean?
He loved her so absolutely, he had such exalted faith in her kindness, her gentleness, her fairness and superiority,--in _her_,--that he could not believe she would so thrust back his love, purely and chivalrously offered, with something that seemed like ignominy, unless she had a sufficient reason--or one she deemed such--for treating so cruelly him and the offering he laid at her feet.
But she had spoken.

It was for him, then, when she bade silence, to keep it; when she refused his gift, to refrain from thrusting it upon her attention and heart.

But ah, the silence and the refraining! Ah, the time--the weary, sore, intolerable time--that followed! Summer, and autumn, and winter, and the seasons repeated once again, he tramped across the soil of Virginia, already wet with rebel and patriot blood; he felt the shame and agony of Bull Run; he was in the night struggle at Ball's Bluff, where those wondrous Harvard boys found it "sweet to die for their country," and discovered, for them, "death to be but one step onward in life." He lay in camp, chafing with impatience and indignation as the long months wore away, and the thousands of graves about Washington, filled by disease and inaction, made "all quiet along the Potomac." He went down to Yorktown; was in the sweat and fury of the seven days' fight; away in the far South, where fever and pestilence stood guard to seize those who were spared by the bullet and bayonet; and on many a field well lost or won.

Through it all marching or fighting, sick, wounded thrice and again; praised, admired, heroic, promoted,--from private soldier to general,--through two years and more of such fiery experience, no part of the tender love was burned away, tarnished, or dimmed.
Sometimes, indeed, he even smiled at himself for the constant thought, and felt that he must certainly be demented on this one point at least, since it colored every impression of his life, and, in some shape, thrust itself upon him at the most unseemly and foreign times.
One evening, when the mail for the division came in, looking over the pile of letters, his eye was caught by one addressed to James Given.