activities had
escaped, and were active still, beneficent still.... The word "shells"
in the dream turned the page. She was upon a great sea beach and quite
alone. She sat and looked at the waves coming rolling in, and presently
one laid Richard at her feet. She bandaged the cut upon his forehead,
and called him by his name, and he looked at her and smiled. "Out of the
ocean, into the ocean," he said. "All of us. A going forth and a
returning." She felt herself, in the dream, in his arms, and found it
sweet. The waves were beneath them; they lay now on the crests, now in
the hollows, and there seemed no port. This endured a long while, until
she thought she heard the sea-fairies singing. Then there came a booming
sound, and she thought, "This is the port, or perhaps it is an island
that we are passing." She asked Richard which it was, but he did not
answer, and she turned upon the wave and found that he was not there....
It was seaweed about her arms. The booming grew louder, rattled the
window-glass. She opened her eyes, pushed her dark loosened hair from
her arms and bosom, and sat up. "The cannon again!"

She looked at her watch. It was two o'clock. Rising, she put on her
dark, thin muslin, and took her shady hat. The room seemed to throb to
the booming guns. All the birds had flown from the tulip tree outside.
She went downstairs and tapped at her cousin's door. "How is
he?"--"Conscious now, thank God, my dear! The doctor says he will be
spared. How the house shakes! And Walter and Ronald out there. You are
going back?"

"Yes. Do not look for me to-night. There will be so much to be done--"

"Yes, yes, my dear. Louder and louder! And Ronald is so reckless! You
must have something to eat."

"Shirley will give me a glass of milk. Tell Rob to get well. Good-bye."

She kissed her cousin, drank her glass of milk in the dining-room where
the silver was jingling on the sideboard, and went out into the hot,
sound-filled air. At three she was at her post in the hospital.

The intermittent thunder, heavier than any on the continent before, was
stilled at last,--at nine, as had happened the night before. The mazed
city shook the mist from before its eyes, and settled to the hot night's
work, with the wagons, bringing the dead and the wounded, dull on the
cobblestones to the ear, but loud, loud to the heart. All that night the
Stonewall Hospital was a grisly place. By the next morning every
hospital in town was choked wit