the moving panel, a soldier boy's pure wantonness had
prompted him to the act which, in fact, only she had committed. So she
had set Anna's whole soul upon getting back to New Orleans to regain the
trinket-treasure and somehow get out with it to Mobile, imperiled
Mobile, where now, if on earth anywhere, her hope was to find Hilary
Kincaid.

Does it not tax all patience, that no better intuition of heart, no
frenzy of true love in either Hilary or Anna--suffering the frenzies
they did--should have taught them to rend the poor web that held them
separate almost within the sound of each other's cry? No, not when we
consider other sounds, surrounding conditions: miles and miles of
riflemen and gunners in so constant a whirlwind of destruction and
anguish that men like Maxime Lafontaine and Sam Gibbs went into open
hysterics at their guns, and even while sleeping on their arms, under
humming bullets and crashing shells and over mines ready to be sprung,
sobbed and shivered like babes, aware in their slumbers that they might
"die before they waked." In the town unearthly bowlings and volcanic
thunders, close overhead, cried havoc in every street, at every cave
door. There Anna, in low daily fevers, with her "heart in New Orleans,"
had to be "kept quiet" by Miranda and Constance, the latter as widowed
as Anna, wondering whether "Steve was alive or not."

This is a history of hearts. Yet, time flying as it does, the wild
fightings even in those hearts, the famishing, down-breaking sieges in
them, must largely be left untold--Hilary's, Anna's, Flora's, all.
Kincaid was in greater temptation than he knew. Many a battery boy,
sick, sound or wounded--Charlie for one--saw it more plainly than he.
Anna, supposed to be far away and away by choice, was still under the
whole command's impeachment, while Flora, amid conditions that gave
every week the passional value of a peacetime year, was here at hand, an
ever-ministering angel to them and to their hero; yet they never
included him and Flora in one thought together but to banish it, though
with tender reverence. Behind a labored disguise of inattention they
jealously watched lest the faintest blight or languor should mar, in
him, the perfect bloom of that invincible faith to, and faith in, the
faithless Anna, which alone could satisfy their worship of him. Care for
these watchers brought the two much together, and in every private
moment they talked of the third one; Flora still fin