om he admired so
much. Their place was not here, nor was his place here with them. He was
eaten with doubt and anxiety. Who was losing, who was winning out there
beyond the veil of the forest where the pall of smoke rose? He struck
the window-sill angrily with his fist.

"I hate this silence and desolation here around us," he exclaimed, "with
all that noise and battle off there where we cannot see! It chills me!"

But the two women said nothing, still sitting with their hands in each
other's and unconscious of it; forgetting now in this meeting of the two
hundred thousand the petty personal feelings that had divided them.

Louder swelled the tumult. It seemed to Helen, oblivious to all else,
that she heard amid the thunder of the cannon other and varying notes.
There was a faint but shrill incessant sound like the hum of millions of
bees flying swiftly, and another, a regular but heavier noise, was
surely the tread of charging horsemen. The battle was rolling a step
nearer to them, and she began to see, low down under the pall of smoke,
flashes of fire like swift strokes of lightning. Then it rolled another
step nearer and its tumult beat heavily and cruelly on the drums of her
ears. Yet the deathly stillness in the scrub oaks around the house
continued. They waved as peacefully as ever in the gentle wind from the
west. It was still a battle heard but not seen.

She would have left the window to cower in the corner with the coloured
woman who served them, but this struggle, of which she could see only
the covering veil, held her appalled. It was misty, intangible, unlike
anything of which she had read or heard, and yet she knew it to be real.
They were in conflict, the North and the South, there in the forest, and
she sat as one in a seat in a theatre who looked toward a curtained
stage.

When she put her free hand once on the window-sill she felt beneath her
fingers the faint, steady trembling of the wood as the vast, insistent
volume of sound beat upon it. The cloud of smoke now spread in a huge,
somber curve across all the east, and the swift flashes of fire were
piercing through it faster and faster. The volume of sound grew more and
more varied, embracing many notes.

"It comes our way," murmured Harley, to himself rather than to the
women.

Helen felt a quiver run through the hand of Mrs. Markham and she looked
at her face. The elder woman was pale, but she was not afraid. She, too,
would not leave the win