a bed made by spreading their overcoats and
blankets upon the springy cedar boughts, and all but Harry were soon
fast asleep. Though fully as weary as they he could not sleep for hours.
He was dominated by a feeling that a crisis in his fate was at hand, and
as he lay and looked at the stars every possible shape that that fate
could take drifted across his mind, even as the endlessly-varying
cloud-shapes swept--now languidly, now hurriedly--across the domed sky
above him. And as the moon and the stars shone through or around each
of the clouds, making the lighter ones masses of translucent glory,
and gilding the edges of even the blackest with silvery promise, so the
thoughts of Rachel Bond suffused with some brightness every possible
happening to him. If he achieved anything the achievement would have for
its chief value that it won her commendation; if he fell, the blackness
of death would be gilded by her knowledge that he died a brave man's
death for her sweet sake.

He listened awhile to the mournful whinny of the mules; to the sound of
artillery rolling up the resonant pike; to the crashing of newly-arrived
regiments through the cedars as they made their camps in line-of-battle;
to little spurts of firing between the nervous pickets, and at last
fell asleep to dream that he was returning to Sardis, maimed but
honor-crowned, to claim Rachel as his exultant bride.

----

The Christmas forenoon was quite well-advanced before the fatigue of
Rachel Bond's long ride was sufficiently abated to allow her to awaken.
Then a soft hum of voices impressed itself upon her drowsy senses, and
she opened her eyes with the idea that there were several persons in
the room engaged in conversation. But she saw that there was only Aunt
Debby, seated in a low rocking-chair by the lazily burning fire, and
reading aloud from a large Bible that lay open upon her knees. The
reading was slow and difficult, as of one but little used to it, and
many of the longer words were patiently spelled out. But this labored
picking the way along the rugged path of knowledge, stumbling and
halting at the nouns, and verbs, and surmounting the polysyllables a
letter at a time, seemed to give the reader a deeper feeling of the
value and meaning of each word, than is usually gained by the more
facile scholar. As Rachel listened she became aware that Aunt Debby
was reading that wonderful twelfth chapter of St. Luke, richest of all
chapters in hopes and prom