Before it seemed as if she could have
written, there came news of the first skirmish, and in the list of the
killed, which was telegraphed as a trifling loss on our side, was
Gearson's name. There was a frantic time of trying to make out that it
might be, must be, some other Gearson; but the name and the company and
the regiment and the State were too definitely given.
Then there was a lapse into depths out of which it seemed as if she
never could rise again; then a lift into clouds far above all grief,
black clouds, that blotted out the sun, but where she soared with him,
with George--George! She had the fever that she expected of herself, but
she did not die in it; she was not even delirious, and it did not last
long. When she was well enough to leave her bed, her one thought was of
George's mother, of his strangely worded wish that she should go to her
and see what she could do for her. In the exaltation of the duty laid
upon her--it buoyed her up instead of burdening her--she rapidly
recovered.
Her father went with her on the long railroad journey from northern New
York to western Iowa; he had business out at Davenport, and he said he
could just as well go then as any other time; and he went with her to
the little country town where George's mother lived in a little house
on the edge of the illimitable cornfields, under trees pushed to a top
of the rolling prairie.
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