e God and the world had sworn her his mated, life-long protection?

"Hilary!" she wailed, and as the echoes of the green wood died,
"Hilary!" again. On one side there was more light in the verdure than
elsewhere and that way she called. That way she moved stumblingly and
near the edge of a small clear space cried once more, "Hilary!...
Hilary!"

LX

HILARY'S GHOST

Faintly the bearer of that name heard the call; heard it rise from a
quarter fearfully nearer the foe's line than to his; caught it with his
trained ear as, just beyond sight of Irby, Miranda, and others, he stood
in amazed converse with Flora Valcour. Fortune, smiling on Flora yet,
had brought first to her the terrified funeral group and so had enabled
her to bear to Hilary the news of the strange estrayal, skilfully
blended with that revelation of Anna's Vicksburg sojourn which she,
Flora, had kept from him so cleverly and so long.

With mingled rapture and distress, with a heart standing as still as his
feet, as still as his lifted head and shining eyes, he listened and
heard again. Swiftly, though not with the speed he would have chosen, he
sprang toward the call; sped softly through the brush, softly and
without voice, lest he draw the enemy's fire; softly and mutely, with
futile backward wavings and frowning and imploring whispers to Flora as
in a dishevelled glow that doubled her beauty she glided after him.

Strangely, amid a swarm of keen perceptions that plagued him like a
cloud of arrows as he ran, that beauty smote his conscience; her beauty
and the worship and protection it deserved from all manhood and most of
all from him, whose unhappy, unwitting fortune it was to have ensnared
her young heart and brought it to the desperation of an unnatural
self-revealment; her uncoveted beauty, uncourted love, unwelcome
presence, and hideous peril! Was he not to all these in simplest honor
peculiarly accountable? They lanced him through with arraignment as,
still waving her beseechingly, commandingly back, with weapons undrawn
the more swiftly to part the way before him, his frenzy for Anna drew
him on, as full of introspection as a drowning man, thinking a year's
thoughts at every step. Oh, mad joy in pitiful employment! Here while
the millions of a continent waged heroic war for great wrongs and
rights, here on the fighting-line of a beleaguered and starving city,
here when at any instant the peal of his own guns might sound a fresh
onset,