The news flashed over the wires and into Weston, and the town was appalled. Never in the four long years that followed was there again a day so filled with stern astonishment to the entire North as that Monday after Bull Run. The Aid Rooms, where Anne worked during her leisure hours, were filled with helpers now; all hearts were excited and in earnest. West Virginia was the field to which their aid was sent, a mountain region whose streams were raised in an hour into torrents, and whose roads were often long sloughs of despond, through which the soldiers of each side gloomily pursued each other by turns, the slowness of the advancing force only equalled by that of the pursued, which was encountering in front the same disheartening difficulties. The men in hospital on the edges of this region, worn out with wearying marches, wounded in skirmishes, stricken down by the insidious fever which haunts the river valleys, suffered as much as those who had the names of great battles wherewith to identify themselves; but they lacked the glory. One sultry evening, when the day's various labor was ended, Anne, having made a pretense of eating in her lonely room, went across to the bank of the lake to watch the sun set in the hazy blue water, and look northward toward the island. She was weary and sad: where were now the resolution and the patience with which she had meant to crown her life? You did not know, poor Anne, when you framed those lofty purposes, that suffering is just as hard to bear whether one is noble or ignoble, good or bad. In the face of danger the heart is roused, and in the exaltation of determination forgets its pain; it is the long monotony of dangerless days that tries the spirit hardest. A letter had come to her that morning, bearing a Boston postmark; the address was in the neat, small handwriting of Jeanne-Armande's friend. Anne, remembering that it was this Boston address which she had sent to her grandaunt, opened the envelope eagerly. But it was only the formal letter of a lawyer. Miss Vanhorn had died, on the nineteenth of June, in Switzerland, and the lawyer wrote to inform "Miss Anne Douglas" that a certain portrait, said in the will to be that of "Alida Clanssen," had been bequeathed to her by his late client, and would be forwarded to her address, whenever she requested it. Anne had expected nothing, not even this. But an increased solitariness came upon her as she thought of that cold rigid face lying under the turf far away in Switzerland--the face of the only relative left to her.