g, now sinking, as though blown under by a
wind.

She sought the piazza stairs and next moment was in the garden, then she
found herself in the street.

Meeting Street was almost deserted. On the opposite side two stout,
elderly and rather quaintly dressed gentlemen were walking along in the
direction of the station, but away down towards the Charleston Hotel there
was a crowd.

The sight of this crowd filled her with terror, a terror remote from
reason, an impersonal terror, as though the deadliest peril were
threatening not herself but all things and everything she loved.

She ran, and as she drew close to the striving mass of people she saw men
bearing stretchers.

They were pushing their way through the crowd, making to enter a house on
the right.

Then came a voice. The voice of one man shouting to another.

"Young Pinckney's killed."

The words pierced her like a sword, she felt herself falling. Falling
through darkness to unconsciousness, from which she awoke to find herself
lying on the cane couch in her room.

She sat up.

The curtains were still stirring gently to the faint wind from outside, on
the floor lay the history of the Civil War open just as she had cast it
there before falling asleep. The sound of the guns had ceased, and nothing
was to be heard but the stray accustomed sounds of the city and the
street.

She struggled to her feet and came out on the piazza. The garden gate was
closed and the garden was unaltered. She had dreamt all that, then.

For a minute she tried to persuade herself that it was a dream, then she
gave up the attempt. That was no dream. Everything in it was four square.
She could still see the shadows of the two gentlemen who had been walking
on the other side of the street, shadows cast clearly before them by the
sun.

The first part of her experience had been a dream, all that about Miss
Pinckney and Juliet. But right from the sound of the guns all had been
reality. She had seen, touched, heard.

Glancing back into the room she saw the book lying on the floor, the sight
of it was like a crystallising thread for thought.

She had seen the past, she had heard the guns of the war.

She went back into the room and took her seat on the couch and held her
head between her hands. She recalled the terror that told her that
everything she loved was in danger. When the man had cried out that young
Pinckney was killed, it was the thought of the death of Richard Pinckne