At a Girl's Mercy, or, The Fortunes of War — page 192: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AT A GIRL’S MERCY. 181 south, where more than one fierce battle had been fought. ‘‘He had your eyes, with the smile always in em, and your -hair, though it wasn’t so soft and so long; and there was the same sunniness about him somehow as there is about you. I hope you won’t mind my speaking about it, but I have been puzzling my brains, lying here, trying to discover whom you did remind me of, and it came to me just now like a streak of light that it was that young fellow, though I don’t know, and never did know his name.”’ Nan paused willingly now, her fair face flushing with delight, her eyes full of the smiling the man had so described, the lips trembling with the sud- den hope that now she had met some one who could tell her of Frank—for that it was Frank whom the soldier meant, she had not a doubt—and she had never heard from this dearest of her brothers, this best beloved because so sunny-hearted, always so ready to enter into her spirit of madcap pleasure, when graver Charlie would have stopped to think. Her heart had been so sore because of the silence of this brother that now the faint ray of hope that she should hear something of him, even if but a crumb of comfort, made her heart quicken its beating and her face alight with hope. This soldier of hers had been through the thickest of the fight, and must know if her Frank, her bonny, blue-eyed brother, were still to come to her when this dreadful war should be over. From Charlie she had heard, but from Frank not a word since the day she bade Helen adieu in the shadowy old Hall with the silence of death brooding over it. ‘Tell me about him, Corporal Brown,’’ she said, and her voice was low and winning, the ight upon her face proving the light in her heart. “I think you must mean my brother. We have the same hair and eyes, they say, and he was the dearest, sunni- est tempered fellow in the world, and I’m just sure no one else Gould be quite like him.’’ She sat down - beside the man, brushing as she did so the dark hair that clung to the damp forehead where the heat and the suffering were doing their best to weaken a =) €O iGcbooks (EO) > & - Bez . lle Ne ” Pa .