ne-armed brother! Anna kneels with him
over the writhing form while women fly for the surgeon, and men, at her
cry, hasten to improvise a litter. No idle song haunts her now, yet a
clamoring whisper times itself with every pulsation of her bosom: "The
letter? the letter?"

Pity kept it from her lips, even from her weeping eyes; yet somehow the
fallen boy heard, but when he tried to answer she hushed him. "Oh, never
mind that," she said, wiping away the sweat of his agony, "it isn't
important at all."

"Dropped it," he gasped, and had dropped it where the shell had buried
it forever.

Each for the other's sake the lads rejected the hospital, with its risk
of capture. The younger had the stricken one hurried off toward the
railway and a refugee mother in the hills, Constance tenderly protesting
until the surgeon murmured the truth:

"It'll be all one to him by to-morrow."

As the rearmost ship was passing the house Anna, her comeliness
restored, half rose from her bed, where Miranda stood trying to keep
her. From all the far side of the house remotely sounded the smart tramp
and shuffle of servants clearing away wreckage, and the din of their
makeshift repairs. She was "all right again," she said as she sat, but
the abstraction of her eyes and the harkening droop of her head showed
that inwardly she still saw and heard the death-struck boy.

Suddenly she stood. "Dear, brave Connie!" she exclaimed, "we must go
help her, 'Randa." And as they went she added, pausing at the head of a
stair, "Ah, dear! if we, poor sinners all, could in our dull minds only
multiply the awful numbers of war's victims by the woes that gather
round any one of them, don't you think, 'Randa--?"

Yes, Miranda agreed, certainly if man--yes, and woman--had that gift
wars would soon be no more.

On a high roof above their apartment stood our Valcour ladies. About
them babbling feminine groups looked down upon the harbor landings black
with male vagabonds and witlings smashing the precious food freight (so
sacred yesterday), while women and girls scooped the spoils from mire
and gutter into buckets, aprons or baskets, and ran home with it through
Jackson Square and scurried back again with grain-sacks and
pillow-slips, and while the cotton burned on and the ships, so broadly
dark aloft, so pale in their war paint below and so alive with silent,
motionless men, came through the smoking havoc.

"No uze to hope," cooed the grandmother to Flora, w