Letty, lying on a mattress, had fallen asleep. Ailsa, scarcely able to breathe in the heavy heat, leaned panting against the framework, watching the darkness. It seemed to be a little cooler on the Virginia side after they had passed the General Hospital, and had gone forward through the deserted city of Alexandria. About a mile beyond a slight freshness, scarcely a breeze, stirred Ailsa's hair. The driver said to her, pointing at a shadowy bulk with his whip-stock: "That's the Marshall House, where Colonel Ellsworth was killed. God help their 'Tigers' if the Fire Zouaves ever git at 'em." She looked at the unlighted building in silence. Farther on the white tents of a Pennsylvania regiment loomed gray under the stars; beyond them the sentinels were zouaves of an Indiana regiment, wearing scarlet fezzes. Along the road, which for a while paralleled the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, cavalry vedettes sat their horses, carbine on thigh. No trains passed the embankment; once she saw, on a weed-grown siding, half a dozen locomotives apparently intact; but no fire burned in their furnaces, no smoke curled from their huge drumhead stacks; and on the bell frame of one an owl was sitting. And now, between a double line of ditches, where a battalion of engineers lay asleep in their blankets, the road entered the pine woods. Ailsa slept fitfully, but the far challenge and the halting of the waggon usually awoke her in darkness feebly lit by the rays of a candle-set lantern, swung up inquiringly by the corporal of some guard. And, "Pass forward, Sanitary!" was the invariable formula; and the ambulance rolled on again between a double abattis of fallen trees, flanked on either horizon by tall, quiet pines. Once she heard singing; a small company of cavalry-men straggled by, and, seeing their long lances and their Belgian forage caps, she leaned out and asked what regiment it might be. Somebody answered: "Escort Squad of Rankin's Lancers, 1st United States. Our regiment is in Detroit, Miss, and thank God we're going back there." And they rode on toward Washington, singing their monotonous "Do They Miss Me at Home" song, till she lost them against the darkness of the distant woods, and dropped back to her bed of shawls and blankets once more. After midnight she slept, and it was only the noise the driver made pulling the canvas cover of the frame above her that awakened her, and she sat up, half frozen, in a fine fog that became a drizzle soon after the cover was up. "The sunny South," observed the driver in disgust. "Yesterday the thermometer stood at 105 in Washington, and now look at this here weather, lady." Day broke, bitter cold; it was raining heavily; but soon after sunrise the rain slackened, the fog grew thinner, and the air warmer. Slowly the sun appeared, at first only a dazzling blot through the smother, then brassy, glittering, flooding the chilled earth with radiance.