ss more
deserve its name; gloomy at any time, it had new attributes of solemn
majesty. Everything seemed to be in unison with those who lay there--the
pitchy blackness, the low muttering of distant thunder, the fitful
glimmer of the lightning, the stems of trees twisted and contorted by
the gleam of the uncertain flashes, the white faces of the slain
upturned to the sky seen dimly by the same light, the banks of smoke and
vapour yet floating through the forest, the strange, repellent odours,
and the heavy, melancholy silence.

Those who had come upon the field after the night began worked without
talk, the men from either side passing and repassing each other, but
showing no hostility. The three women, too, began to help them, doing
the errand upon which they had come, and their service was received
without question and without comment. No one asked another why he was
there; his duty lay plain before him.

It was Lucia Catherwood who took the lead, neither Helen nor Mrs.
Markham disputing her fitness for the place, too apparent to all to be
denied; it was she who never flinched, who, if she spoke at all, spoke
words of cheer, whose strength and courage seemed never to fail.

Thus the hours passed, and the character of the night in the Wilderness
did not change. There was yet compared with the tumult of the day a
heavy, oppressive silence; the smoke and the vapours did not go away,
the heavy atmosphere did not thin, and at intervals the distant thunder
rumbled and the fitful lightning glared over a distorted forest.

The three worked in silence, like those around them, faithful,
undaunted. Mrs. Markham, the cynical and worldly, was strangely changed,
perhaps the most changed of the three; all her affectations were gone,
and she was now only an earnest woman. And while the three worked they
always watched for one man. And this man was not the same with any one
of the three.

It was past midnight and Helen did not know how long she had been upon
the battlefield, working as she did in a kind of a dream, or rather
mist, in which everything was fanciful and unreal, with her head full of
strange sights and unheard sounds, when she saw two men ride side by
side and silently out of the black forest--two figures, one upright,
powerful, the other drooping, with head that swayed slightly from side
to side.

She knew them at once despite the shadows of the trees and the faint
moonlight--and it was what her thoughts had told h