-sinze she's tol' you--w'at she's tol' you!"

In this long history of a moment the blue skirmishers had not yet
found Anna, but it was their advance, their soft stir at her back as
they came upon their fallen leader, that had hushed her cries. At the
rift in the wood she had leaned on a huge oak and as body and mind again
failed had sunk to its base in leafy hiding. Vaguely thence she
presently perceived, lit from behind her by sunset beams, the farther
edge of the green opening, and on that border, while she feebly looked,
came suddenly a ghost!

[Illustration: "You 'ave no ri-ight to leave me! _Ah, you shall not!_"]

Ah, Heaven! the ghost of Hilary Kincaid! It looked about for her! It
listened for her call! By the tree's rough bark she drew up half her
height, clung and, with reeling brain, gazed. How tall! how gaunt! how
dingy gray! How unlike her whilom "ladies' man," whom, doubtless truly,
they now called dead and buried. But what--what--was troubling the poor
ghost? What did it so wildly avoid? what wave away with such loving,
tender pain? Flora Valcour! Oh, see, see! Ah, death in life! what does
she see? As by the glare of a bursting midnight shell all the empty
gossip of two years justified--made real--in one flash of staring view.
With a long moan the beholder cast her arms aloft and sank in a heap,
not knowing that the act had caught Hilary's eye, but willingly aware
that her voice had perished in a roar of artillery from the farther
brink of the ravine, in a crackle and fall of tree-tops, and in the
"rebel yell" and charge.

Next morning, in a fog, the blue holders of a new line of rifle-pits
close under the top of a bluff talked up to the grays in a trench on its
crest. Gross was the banter, but at mention of "ladies" it purified.

"Johnnie!" cried "Yank," "who is she, the one we've got?" and when told
to ask her, said she was too ill to ask. By and by to "Johnnie's"
inquiries the blues replied:

"He? the giant? Hurt? No-o, not half bad enough, when we count what he
cost us. If we'd known he was only stunned we"--and so on, not very
interestingly, while back in the rear of the gray line tearful Constance
praised, to her face, the haggard Flora and, in his absence, the wounded
Irby, Flora's splendid rescuer in the evening onslaught.

"A lifetime debt," Miranda thought Flora owed him, and Flora's
meditative yes, as she lifted her eyes to her grandmother's,
was--peculiar.

A few days later Anna, waking