s, kept society tremendously gay, by gas-light; and
courage and fortitude and love of country and trust in God and scorn of
the foe went clad in rainbow colors; but at the height of all manner of
revels some pessimist was sure to explain to Anna why the war must be
long, of awful cost, and with a just fighting chance to win.

"Then why do we not turn about right here?"

"Too late now."

Such reply gave an inward start, it seemed so fitted to her own
irrevealable case. But it was made to many besides her, and women came
home from dinings or from operas and balls for the aid of this or that
new distress of military need, and went up into the dark and knelt in
all their jewels and wept long. In March the poor, everywhere, began to
be out of work, and recruiting to be lively among them too, because for
thousands of them it was soldier's pay or no bread. Among the troops
from the country death had begun to reap great harvests ere a gun was
fired, and in all the camps lovers nightly sang their lugubrious
"Lorena," feeling that "a hundred months had passed" before they had
really dragged through one. March was so tedious, and lovers are such
poor arithmeticians. Wherever Hilary Kincaid went, showing these how to
cast cannon (that would not burst), those where to build fortifications,
and some how to make unsickly camps, that song was begged of him in the
last hour before sleep; last song but one, the very last being
always--that least liked by Anna.

Tedious to Kincaid's Battery were his absences on so many errands.
Behind a big earthwork of their own construction down on the river's
edge of the old battle ground, close beyond the Callenders', they lay
camped in pretty white tents that seemed to Anna, at her window, no
bigger than visiting-cards. Rarely did she look that way but the fellows
were drilling, their brass pieces and their officers' drawn sabres
glinting back the sun, horses and men as furiously diligent as big and
little ants, and sometimes, of an afternoon, their red and yellow silk
and satin standard unfurled--theirs and hers. Of evenings small bunches
of the boys would call to chat and be sung to; to threaten to desert if
not soon sent to the front; and to blame all delays on colonels and
brigadiers "known" by them to be officially jealous of--They gave only
the tedious nickname.

"Why belittle him with that?" queried Miranda, winning Anna's silent
gratitude.

"It doesn't belittle _him_," cried Charlie. "