that Beauregard was
in Miss'--"

Anna touched her, and the cry came again: "Great victory--!" Yes, yes,
but by whom, and where? Johnston? Corinth? "Great victory at--!" Where?
Where, did he say? The word came again, and now again, but still it was
tauntingly vague. Anna's ear seemed best, yet even she could say only,
"I never heard of such a place--out of the bible. It sounds
like--Shiloh."

Shiloh it was. At a table lamp indoors the Doctor bent over the fresh
print. "It's true," he affirmed. "It's Beauregard's own despatch. 'A
complete victory,' he says. 'Driving the enemy'--" The reader ceased and
stared at the page. "Why, good God!" Slowly he lifted his eyes upon
those three sweet women until theirs ran full. And then he stared once
more into the page: "Oh, good God! Albert Sidney Johnston is dead."

XLIII

THAT SABBATH AT SHILOH

"Whole theatre of action."

The figure had sounded apt to Anna on that Sunday evening when the
Doctor employed it; apt enough--until the outburst of that great and
dreadful news whose inseparable implications and forebodings robbed her
of all sleep that night and made her the first one astir at daybreak.
But thenceforward, and now for half a week or more, the aptness seemed
quite to have passed. Strange was the theatre whose play was all and
only a frightful reality; whose swarming, thundering, smoking stage had
its audience, its New Orleans audience, wholly behind it, and whose
curtain of distance, however thin, mocked every bodily sense and
compelled all to be seen and heard by the soul's eye and ear, with all
the joy and woe of its actuality and all its suspense, terror, triumph,
heartbreak, and despair.

Yet here was that theatre, and the Doctor's metaphor was still good
enough for the unexacting taste of the two Valcour ladies, to whom Anna
had quoted it. And here, sprinkled through the vast audience of that
theatre, with as keen a greed for its play as any, were all the various
non-combatants with whom we are here concerned, though not easily to be
singled out, such mere units were they of the impassioned multitude
every mere unit of which, to loved and loving ones, counted for more
than we can tell.

However, our favourites might be glimpsed now and then. On a certain
midday of that awful half-week the Callenders, driving, took up
Victorine at her gate and Flora at her door and sped up-town to the
newspaper offices in Camp street to rein in against a countless surg