got rid of
my dreadful message. I do not know if you still care to hear it. But
you were once generous enough to think that I had done you a service in
bringing a letter to your commander. Although I know better than anybody
else the genuine devotion to your duty that made you accept my poor
service, from all that I can hear, you have never had the credit of it.
Will you not try me again? I am more in favor here, and I might yet be
more successful in showing your superiors how true you have been to your
trust, even if you have little faith in your friend, Matilda Faulkner."

For a long time he remained motionless, with the letter in his hand.
Then he arose, ordered his horse, and galloped away.

There was little difficulty in finding the cemetery of Three Pines
Crossing--a hillside slope, hearsed with pine and cypress, and starred
with white crosses, that in the distance looked like flowers. Still
less was there in finding the newer marble shaft among the older
lichen-spotted slabs, which bore the simple words: "Alice Benham,
Martyr." A few Confederate soldiers, under still plainer and newer
wooden headstones, carved only with initials, lay at her feet. Brant
sank on his knees beside the grave, but he was shocked to see that the
base of the marble was stained with the red pollen of the fateful lily,
whose blossoms had been heaped upon her mound, but whose fallen petals
lay dark and sodden in decay.

How long he remained there he did not know. And then a solitary bugle
from the camp seemed to summon him, as it had once before summoned him,
and he went away--as he had gone before--to a separation that he now
knew was for all time.

Then followed a month of superintendence and drill, and the infusing
into the little camp under his instruction the spirit which seemed to
be passing out of his own life forever. Shut in by alien hills on the
borderland of the great struggle, from time to time reports reached
him of the bitter fighting, and almost disastrous successes of his old
division commander. Orders came from Washington to hurry the preparation
of his raw levies to the field, and a faint hope sprang up in his
mind. But following it came another dispatch ordering his return to the
Capital.

He reached it with neither hope nor fear--so benumbed had become his
spirit under this last trial, and what seemed to be now the mockery of
this last sacrifice to his wife. Though it was no longer a question of
her life and safety