arty, remained indifferent and unmoved; but his wife, all of the savage
in her rising to the surface, grew intoxicated almost to the point of
delirium.

Ordinarily so demure and quiet, she became from henceforward a creature
of another clay. Whirling her ax and dancing almost naked at the head of
the Oa contingent, she led it wherever it was sent, daring bullets and
shells with smiling intrepidity. In her wild beauty an artist might have
taken her for the spirit of war itself, as she moved undaunted along the
firing line, or with biting reproaches drove up skulkers from the rear.
Like some untried actress bringing down her house, she was overborne
with her own success; and the more she was praised the more
extravagantly and unflinchingly she exposed herself. Under the stress of
those fierce emotions her character in every way underwent a change for
the worse. In war time, death, always in the air, seems to annihilate
with its dark shadow all the bonds that bind society together. Life,
hitherto so assured, of a sudden becomes the most transient of human
gifts, to be enjoyed with a feverish heedlessness before it vanishes
forever into the unknown. Thus Fetuao found and accepted a dozen lovers
among her men, and while still according her husband the first place,
she yet permitted them liberties and familiarities that they were not
slow to take advantage of.

Deep in every woman's heart there is a love for the men of her race, a
love motherly and pitiful, that will bring the tears to her eyes at the
sight of a passing regiment and cause her to passionately mourn the
unknown soldier dead. This sentiment, this instinct, is a thousandfold
intensified on the bloody field itself. The pang when those brave
fellows fall is inexpressible; her pride is strangely humbled, and in
her mad exaltation she shrinks from nothing, and makes a virtue of her
own abandonment.

Jack followed Fetuao everywhere, a despondent, woe-begone figure, who,
amid the hail of bullets and the yells of contending warriors, lay or
ran or advanced with the others in a black preoccupation. He had not a
spark of interest in the struggle; his thoughts were forty miles away in
that ruined home, with his plants, and trees, and shrubs, his cow, and
his chickens. What victory could give them back? What terror had a
defeat for one who had already lost his all! He lived in the past, in
those frugal, thrifty, laborious years; for the present he had but an
indifference