colours, with the thunder of the cannon in one's ears? He
knew now why his fathers had loved a fight, had loved the glitter of the
bayonets and the savage smell of the discoloured earth.

For a moment the old racial spirit flashed above the peculiar sensitiveness
which had come to him from his childhood and his suffering mother; then the
flame went out and the rows of dead men stared at him through the falling
rain in the deserted field.

V

THE WOMAN'S PART

At sunrise on the morning of the battle Betty and Virginia, from the
whitewashed porch of a little railway inn near Manassas, watched the
Governor's regiment as it marched down the single street and into the red
clay road. Through the first faint sunshine, growing deeper as the sun rose
gloriously above the hills, there sounded a peculiar freshness in the
martial music as it triumphantly floated back across the fields. To Betty
it almost seemed that the drums were laughing as they went to battle; and
when the gay air at last faded in the distance, the silence closed about
her with a strangeness she had never felt before--as if the absence of
sound was grown melancholy, like the absence of light.

She shut her eyes and brought back the long gray line passing across the
sunbeams: the tanned eager faces, the waving flags, the rapid, almost
impatient tread of the men as they swung onward. A laugh had run along the
column as it went by her and she had smiled in quick sympathy with some
foolish jest. It was all so natural to her, the gayety and the ardour and
the invincible dash of the young army--it was all so like the spirit of Dan
and so dear to her because of the likeness.

Somewhere--not far away, she knew--he also was stepping briskly across the
first sun rays, and her heart followed him even while she smiled down upon
the regiment before her. It was as if her soul were suddenly freed from her
bodily presence, and in a kind of dual consciousness she seemed to be
standing upon the little whitewashed porch and walking onward beside Dan at
the same moment. The wonder of it glowed in her rapt face, and Virginia,
turning to put some trivial question, was startled by the passion of her
look.

"Have--have you seen--some one, Betty?" she whispered.

The charm was snapped and Betty fell back into time and place.

"Oh, yes, I have seen--some one," her voice thrilled as she spoke. "I saw
him as clearly as I see you; he was all in sunshine and there was a flag