then, with a pallid smile:

"Anything I ask for? Did you say that, sir?"

He nodded.

"Even if I ask for--his pardon?"

The general laughed a distorted laugh.

"I guess we'll bar that," he said. "Will you breakfast, ma'am? The next
room is free, if you want it."

Headquarters bugles began to sound as she crossed the hall, jacket
dangling over her arm, and pushed open the door of a darkened room. The
air within was stifling, she opened a window and thrust back the blinds,
and at the same moment the ringing crack of a rifled cannon shattered
the silence of dawn. Very, very far away a dull boom replied.

Outside, in dusky obscurity, cavalry were mounting; a trooper, pumping
water from a well under her window, sang quietly to himself in an
undertone as he worked, then went off carrying two brimming buckets.

The sour, burned stench of stale campfires tainted the morning
freshness.

She leaned on the sill, looking out into the east. Somewhere yonder,
high against the sky, they were signaling with torches. She watched the
red flames swinging to right, to left, dipping, circling; other sparks
broke out to the north, where two army corps were talking to each other
with fire.

As the sky turned gray, one by one the forest-shrouded hills took shape;
details began to appear; woodlands grew out of fathomless shadows,
fields, fences, a rocky hillock close by, trees in an orchard, some
Sibley tents.

And with the coming of day a widening murmur grew out of the invisible,
a swelling monotone through which, incessantly, near and distant,
broken, cheery little flurries of bugle music, and far and farther
still, where mists hung over a vast hollow in the hills, the dropping
shots of the outposts thickened to a steady patter, running backward and
forward, from east to west, as far as the ear could hear.

A soldier brought her some breakfast; later he came again with her
saddlebags and a big bucket of fresh water, taking away her riding
habit and boots, which she thrust at him from the half-closed door.

Her bath was primitive enough; a sheet from the bed dried her, the
saddlebags yielded some fresh linen, a pair of silk stockings and a
comb.

Sitting there behind closed blinds, her smooth body swathed to the waist
in a sheet, she combed out the glossy masses of her hair before braiding
them once more around her temples; and her dark eyes watched daylight
brighten between the slits in the blinds.

The cannonade was grad