house increased, and the dishes from the breakfast
which they had left on the table kept up an incessant soft, jarring
sound. The battle was still spreading; at first a bent bow, then a
semi-circle, the horns of the crescent were now extending as if they
meant to meet about the house, and yet they saw not a man, not a horse,
not a gun; only afar off the swelling canopy of smoke, and the flashes
of light through it, and nearer by the grass and the leaves, now hanging
dull and lifeless.

Harley groaned again and smote the unoffending window-sill with his
hand.

"Why am I here--why am I here," he repeated, "when the greatest battle
of all the world is being fought?"

The clouds of smoke from the cannon and the clouds from the heated and
heavy air continued to gather in both heavens and were now meeting at
the zenith. The skies were dark, obscure and somber. Most trying of all
was the continuous, heavy jarring sound made by the thunder of the
guns. It got upon the nerves, it smote the brain cruelly, and once Helen
clasped her hands over her ears to shut it out, but she could not; the
sullen mutter was still there, no less ominous because its note was
lower.

A sudden tongue of flame shot up in the east above the forest, but
unlike the others did not go out again; it hung there a red spire,
blood-red against the sky, and grew taller and broader.

"The forest burns!" murmured Harley.

"In May?" said Helen.

"What a cannonade it must be to set green trees on fire!" continued
Harley.

The varying and shriller notes heard through the steady roar of the
great guns now grew more numerous and louder; and most persistent among
them was a nasty buzz, inconceivably wicked in its cry.

"The rifles! A hundred thousand of them at least!" murmured Harley, to
whose ear all these sounds were familiar.

New tongues of fire leaped above the trees and remained there, blood-red
against the sky; sparks at first fugitive and detached, then in showers
and millions, began to fly. Columns of vapour and smoke breaking off
from the main cloud floated toward the house and assailed those at the
window until eyes and nostrils tingled. The strange, nauseous odour, the
mingled reek of blood and dust, powder and human sweat grew heavier and
more sickening.

Helen shuddered again and again, but she could not turn away. The whole
look of the forest had now changed to her. She saw it through a red
mist: all the green, the late green of the new