d kindly. "So many
rumours are afloat that half of them are without foundation. However, I
will make inquiries if you wish," and he passed on with a promise to return
at once.

For a time Virginia stood blankly gazing after him; then she turned
steadily and took down her bonnet from the wardrobe. She even went to the
bureau and carefully tied the pink ribbon strings beneath her chin.

"I am going out, Mammy Riah," she said when she had finished. "No, don't
tell me I mustn't--I am going out, I say."

She stamped her foot impatiently, but Mammy Riah made no protest.

"Des let's go den," she returned, smoothing her head handkerchief as she
prepared to follow.

The sun was already high above, and the breeze, which had blown for three
days from the river, had dropped suddenly since dawn. Down the brick
pavement the relentless glare flashed back into the sky which hung hot blue
overhead. To Virginia, coming from the shade of her rooms, the city seemed
a furnace and the steady murmur a great discord in which every note was one
of pain.

Other women looking for their wounded hurried by her--one stopped to ask if
she had been into the unused tobacco warehouse and if she had seen there a
boy she knew by name? Another, with lint bandages in her hand, begged her
to come into a church hard by and assist in ravelling linen for the
surgeons. Then she looked down, saw the girl's figure, and grew nervous.
"You are not fit, my dear, go home," she urged, but Virginia shook her head
and smiled.

"I am looking for my husband," she answered in a cold voice and passed on.
Mammy Riah caught up with her, but she broke away. "Go home if you want
to--oh, go back," she cried irritably. "I am looking for Jack, you know."

Into the rude hospitals, one after one, she went without shuddering,
passing up and down between the ghastly rows lying half clothed upon the
bare plank floors. Her eyes were strained and eager, and more than one
dying man turned to look after her as she went by, and carried the memory
of her face with him to death. Once she stopped and folded a blanket under
the head of a boy who moaned aloud, and then gave him water from a pitcher
close at hand. "You're so cool--so cool," he sobbed, clutching at her
dress, but she smiled like one asleep and passed on rapidly.

When the long day had worn out at last, she came from an open store filled
with stretchers, and started homeward over the burning pavement. Her search
was useles