cial Messenger, on her knees in the smoke, looked up and around
as a priest bent above her.

"Child," he said, "what are you doing here?" And then his worn gaze fell
on the dead man who lay in the grass staring skyward through his broken
eyeglasses with pleasant, sightless eyes.

The Special Messenger, white to the lips, looked up: "We were on our
knees together, Father Corby. You had said the amen, and the bullet
struck him--here!... He had no chance for confession.... But you
said----"

Her voice failed.

The priest looked at her; she took the dead man's right hand in hers.

"He was a brave man, Father.... And you said--you said--about those who
fell fighting for--their _own_ land--absolution--Christian burial----"

She choked, set her teeth in her under lip and looked down at the dead.
The priest knelt, too.

"Is--is all well with him?" she whispered.

"Surely, child----"

"But--his was the--_other_ flag."

There was a silence.

"Father?"

"I know--I know.... The banner of Christ is broader.... You say he was
kneeling here beside you?"

"Here--so close that I touched him.... And then you said.... Christian
burial--absolution----"

"He was a spy?"

"What am I, Father?"

"Absolved, child--like this poor boy, here at your feet.... What is that
locket in your hand?"

"His picture.... I found it in his house when the cavalry were setting
fire to it.... Oh, I am tired of it all--deathly, deathly sick!... Look
at him lying here! Father, Father, is there no end to death?"

The priest rose wearily; through the back-drifting smoke the long battle
line of the Excelsiors wavered like phantoms in the mist. Six flags
flapped ghostlike above them, behind them men writhed in the trampled,
bloody grass; before them the sheeted volleys rushed outward into
darkness, where the dull battle lightning played.

A maimed, scorched, blackened thing in the grass near by was calling on
Christ; the priest went to him, turning once on his way to look back
where the Special Messenger knelt beside a dead man who lay smiling at
nothing through his shattered eyeglasses.

IV

ROMANCE

The Volunteer Nurse sighed and spread out her slender, iodine-stained
fingers on both knees, looking down at them reflectively.

"It is different now," she said; "sentiment dies under the scalpel. In
the filth and squalor of reality neither the belief in romance nor the
capacity for desiring it endure long.... Even pity becomes atr