t
afternoon on the far-off field, she could scarcely have endured a more
harrowing suspense from moment to moment. Overcome with the agony, she
threw herself on the sofa in the sitting-room and lay quivering,
with her face buried in the pillow, while Miss Morton sat beside her,
stroking her hair and saying such feeble, soothing words as she might.

It is always hard, and for ardent temperaments almost impossible, to
hold the mind balanced in a state of suspense, yielding overmuch neither
to hope nor to fear, under circumstances like these. As a relief to
the torture which such a state of tension ends in causing, the mind
at length, if it cannot abandon itself to hope, embraces even despair.
About five o'clock Miss Morton was startled by an exceeding bitter cry.
Grace was sitting upon the sofa. "Oh, Miss Morton!" she cried, bursting
into tears which before she had not been able to shed, "he is dead!"

"Grace! Grace! what do you mean?"

"He is dead, I know he is dead!" wailed the girl; and then she explained
that while from moment to moment she had sent up prayers for him, every
breath a cry to God, she suddenly had been unable to pray more, and this
she felt was a sign that petition for his life was now vain. Miss
Morton strove to convince her that this was but an effect of overwrought
nerves, but with slight success.

In the early evening Mr. Morton returned with the latest news the
telegraph had brought. The full scope of the result was not yet known.
The advantage had probably remained with the National forces, although
the struggle had been one of those close and stubborn ones, with scanty
laurels for the victors, to be expected when men of one race meet in
battle. The losses on both sides had been enormous, and the report was
confirmed that Philip's division had been badly cut up.

The parsonage was but one of thousands of homes in the land where no
lamps were lighted that evening, the members of the household sitting
together in the dark,--silent, or talking in low tones of the far-away
star-lighted battlefield, the anguish of the wounded, the still heaps of
the dead.

Nevertheless, when at last Grace went home she was less entirely
despairing than in the afternoon. Mr. Morton, in his calm, convincing
way, had shown her the groundlessness of her impression that Philip
was certainly dead, and had enabled her again to entertain hope. It
no longer rose, indeed, to the height of a belief that he had escaped
whol