ontest resounding on their right. As they jostled along the
edge of a wood that lay between them and the firing some mishap to the
front team caused all to alight, whereupon a shell, faultily timed, came
tearing through the tree-tops and exploded in the remains of a fence
close beyond them. Amid thunder, smoke, and brute and human terror the
remounting groups whirled away and had entirely left the scene before
that was asked which none could tell: Where was Anna?

Anna herself did not know, could not inquire of her own mind. With a
consciousness wholly disembodied she was mainly aware of a great pain
that seemed to fill all the region and atmosphere, an atmosphere charged
with mysterious dim green light and full of great boomings amid a
crackle of smaller ones; of shouts and cheers and of a placid quaking of
myriad leaves; all of which things might be things or only divers
manifestations of her undefinable self.

By and by through the pain came a dream of some one like her living in a
certain heaven of comfort and beauty, peace, joy, and love named
"Callender House"; but the pain persisted and the dream passed into a
horrible daytime darkness that brought a sense of vast changes near and
far; a sense of many having gone from that house, and of many having
most forbiddenly come to it; a sense of herself spending years and
years, and passing from world to world, in quest of one Hilary, Hilary
Kincaid, whom all others believed to be dead or false, or both, but who
would and should and must be found, and when found would be alive and
hale and true; a sense of having, with companions, been all at once
frightfully close to a rending of the sky, and of having tripped as she
fled, of having fallen and lain in a thunderous storm of invisible hail,
and of having after a time risen again and staggered on, an incalculable
distance, among countless growing things, fleeing down-hill, too weak to
turn up-hill, till suddenly the whole world seemed to strike hard
against something that sent it reeling backward.

And now her senses began feebly to regather within truer limits and to
tell her she was lying on the rooty ground of a thicket. Dimly she
thought to be up and gone once more, but could get no farther than the
thought although behind her closed lids glimmered a memory of deadly
combat. Its din had passed, but there still sounded, just beyond this
covert, fierce commands of new preparation, and hurried movements in
response--a s