-on a bed----" She
stared at the boy, caught him by the sleeve: "He is dead, isn't he? Do
you know what you are telling me? Do you understand what I am saying?"

"Yes, sir. Captain Stanley was our bandmaster--he wasn't captain then,
of course. He played us in at Sandy River--by God! I oughter know,
because I got some cut up m'self."

"You--you tell me that he wasn't killed?" she repeated, steadying
herself against the canvas flap.

"No, sir. I heard tell he was badly hurt--seems like I kinder
remember--oh, yes!" The man's face lighted up. "Yes, sir; Captain
Stanley, he had a close shave! It sorter comes back to me now, how the
burial detail fetched him back saying they wasn't going to bury no man
that twitched when they shut his coffin. Yes, sir--but it's three years
and a man forgets, and I've seen--things--lots of such things in three
years with Baring's dragoons. Yes, sir."

She closed her eyes; a dizziness swept over her and she swayed where she
stood.

"Is he here?"

"Who? Captain Stanley? Yes, sir. Why, he's captain of the Black Horse
troop--F, third squadron.... They're down that lane near the trees.
Shall I take you there?"

She shook her head, holding tightly to the canvas flap; and the trooper,
saluting easily, resumed his truss of hay, hitched his belt, cocked his
forage cap, and went off whistling.

All that sunny afternoon she lay on the colonel's camp bed, hands
tightly clenched on her breast, eyes closed sometimes, sometimes wide
open, gazing at the sun spots crawling on the tent wall.

To her ears came bugle calls from distant hills; drums of marching
columns. Sounds of the stirring of thousands made tremulous the dim
silence of the tent.

Dreams long dead arose and possessed her--the confused dreams of a
woman, still young, awakened from the passionless lethargy of the past.

Vaguely she felt around her the presence of an earth new born, of a new
heaven created. She realized her own awakening; she strove to comprehend
_his_ resurrection, and it frightened her; she could not understand that
what was dead through all these years was now alive, that the ideal she
had clung to, evoking it until it had become part of her, was real--an
actual and splendid living power. In this vivid resurgence she seemed to
lose her precise recollections of him now that he was alive.

While she had believed him dead, everything concerning his memory had
been painfully real--his personal appearance, the way he m