made Carrington groan in
the silence of his thoughts, than if he had been old Kaspar, and she the
little Wilhelmine. What was a skull more or less to her? What concern
had she in the famous victory?

Yet even Sybil was startled as she rode through the gate and found
herself suddenly met by the long white ranks of head-stones, stretching
up and down the hill-sides by thousands, in order of baffle; as though
Cadmus had reversed his myth, and had sown living men, to come up
dragons' teeth. She drew in her horse with a shiver and a sudden impulse
to cry. Here was something new to her. This was war--wounds, disease,
death. She dropped her voice and with a look almost as serious as
Carrington's, asked what all these graves meant. When Carrington told
her, she began for the first time to catch some dim notion why his
face was not quite as gay as her own. Even now this idea was not very
precise, for he said little about himself, but at least she grappled
with the fact that he had actually, year after year, carried arms
against these men who lay at her feet and who had given their lives for
her cause. It suddenly occurred to her as a new thought that perhaps
he himself might have killed one of them with his own hand. There was
a strange shock in this idea. She felt that Carrington was further from
her. He gained dignity in his rebel isolation. She wanted to ask him
how he could have been a traitor, and she did not dare. Carrington a
traitor!

Carrington killing her friends! The idea was too large to grasp. She
fell back on the simpler task of wondering how he had looked in his
rebel uniform.

They rode slowly round to the door of the house and dismounted, after
he had with some difficulty found a man to hold their horses. From the
heavy brick porch they looked across the superb river to the raw and
incoherent ugliness of the city, idealised into dreamy beauty by the
atmosphere, and the soft background of purple hills behind. Opposite
them, with its crude "thus saith the law" stamped on white dome and
fortress-like walls, rose the Capitol.

Carrington stood with her a short time while they looked at the view;
then said he would rather not go into the house himself, and sat down
on the steps while she strolled alone through the rooms. These were bare
and gaunt, so that she, with her feminine sense of fitness, of course
considered what she would do to make them habitable. She had a neat
fancy for furniture, and distributed he