If he achieved anything the achievement would have for its chief value that it won her commendation; if he fell, the blackness of death would be gilded by her knowledge that he died a brave man's death for her sweet sake.
He listened awhile to the mournful whinny of the mules; to the sound of artillery rolling up the resonant pike; to the crashing of newly-arrived regiments through the cedars as they made their camps in line-of-battle; to little spurts of firing between the nervous pickets, and at last fell asleep to dream that he was returning to Sardis, maimed but honor-crowned, to claim Rachel as his exultant bride.
---- The Christmas forenoon was quite well-advanced before the fatigue of Rachel Bond's long ride was sufficiently abated to allow her to awaken.
Then a soft hum of voices impressed itself upon her drowsy senses, and she opened her eyes with the idea that there were several persons in the room engaged in conversation.

But she saw that there was only Aunt Debby, seated in a low rocking-chair by the lazily burning fire, and reading aloud from a large Bible that lay open upon her knees.

The reading was slow and difficult, as of one but little used to it, and many of the longer words were patiently spelled out.

But this labored picking the way along the rugged path of knowledge, stumbling and halting at the nouns, and verbs, and surmounting the polysyllables a letter at a time, seemed to give the reader a deeper feeling of the value and meaning of each word, than is usually gained by the more facile scholar.

As Rachel listened she became aware that Aunt Debby was reading that wonderful twelfth chapter of St.Luke, richest of all chapters in hopes and promises and loving counsel for the lowly and oppressed.