through her mind flitted spectral
visions of the secondary and so needless carnage in those awful
field-hospitals behind the battles, and of the storms so likely to
follow the fights, when the midnight rain came down in sheets on the
wounded still lying among the dead. On all the teeming, bleeding front
no father, husband, or brother was hers, but amid the multitudinous
exploits and agonies her thoughts were ever on him who, by no tie but
the heart's, had in the past year grown to be father, mother, sister,
and brother to the superb hundred whom she so tenderly knew, who so
worshipingly knew her, and still whose lives, at every chance, he was
hurling at the foe as stones from a sling.

"After all, in these terrible time'," remarked Miss Valcour in committee
of the whole--last session before the public opening--"any toil, even
look' at selfishly, is better than to be idle."

"As if you ever looked at anything selfishly!" said a matron, and there
was a patter of hands.

"Or as if she were ever in danger of being idle!" fondly put in a young
battery sister.

As these two rattled and crashed homeward in a deafening omnibus they
shouted further comments to each other on this same subject. It was
strange, they agreed, to see Miss Valcour, right through the midst of
these terrible times, grow daily handsomer. Concerning Anna, they were
of two opinions. The matron thought that at moments Anna seemed to have
aged three years in one, while, to the girl it appeared that her
beauty--Anna's--had actually increased; taken a deeper tone, "or
something." This huge bazaar business, they screamed, was something a
girl like Anna should never have been allowed to undertake.

"And yet," said the matron on second thought, "it may really have helped
her to bear up."

"Against what?"

"Oh,--all our general disturbance and distress, but the battery's in
particular. You know its very guns are, as we may say, hers, and
everything that happens around them, or to any one who belongs to them
in field, camp, or hospital, happens, in her feeling, to her."

The girl interrupted with a knowing touch: "You realize there's
something else, don't you?"

Her companion showed pain: "Yes, but--I hoped you hadn't heard of it. I
can't bear to talk about it. I know how common it is for men and girls
to trifle with each other, but for such as he--who had the faith of all
of us, yes, and of all his men, that he wasn't as other men are--for
Hilary Kinca