darkness. Everything lay under its veil of
ashes--the table, the floor, and the bed on which Harley had slept.

Helen felt a strange sort of strength, the strength of excitement and
resolve. She shook the black woman by the arm and bade her bring food.

"We must eat, for we shall have work to do," she said to Mrs. Markham,
and nodded her head toward the outside.

It was the task of but a few minutes, and then the two women prepared to
go forth. They knew they would be needed on this night, and they
listened to hear the ominous sounds that would be a call to them. But
they heard nothing. There was the same dead, oppressive stillness. Not a
leaf, not a blade of grass seemed to stir. Helen looked once more from
the window. Afar in the east the forest still burned, but the light
there was pallid, grayish, more of the quality of moonlight than of
fire, and looked dim. Directly before her in the forest where the battle
had been all was black, silent and impenetrable. It was true there were
faint lights here and there as of torches that had burned badly, but
they were pin-points, serving only to deepen the surrounding blackness.
Once or twice she thought she saw figures moving slowly, but she was not
sure. She heard nothing.

Helen was in an unreal world. An atmosphere new, fiery and surcharged
surrounded her, and in its heat little things melted away. Only the
greater remained. That life in Richmond, bright and gay in many of its
aspects, lived but a few days since, was ages and ages ago; it belonged
to another world. Now she was in the forest with the battle and the
dead, and other things did not count.

The door stood wide open, and as Helen prepared to go another woman
entered there, a woman young like herself, tall, wrapped in a long brown
cloak, but bareheaded. Two or three stray locks, dark but edged with red
gold, strayed down. Her face, clear and feminine though it was, seemed
to Helen stronger than any other woman's face that she had ever seen.

Helen knew instinctively that this was a woman of the North, or at
least one with the North, and her first feeling was of hostility. So, as
the two stood looking at each other, her gaze at first was marked by
aversion and defiance. Who was she who had come with the other army, and
why should she be there?

But Lucia Catherwood knew both the women in the old house. She
remembered a day in Richmond when this girl, in lilac and rose, so fair
a representative of her South,