A month from this day he stood upon Virginia earth, duly exchanged. He had been put across at Williamsport. Marchmont had pressed upon him a loan of money and a horse. For a week he had been, in effect, Marchmont’s guest. A strange liking had developed between the two.... But now he was alone, and in Virginia,—Virginia that he had left more than a year ago when the army crossed into Maryland and there followed the battle of Sharpsburg. He was alone, riding through a wood slowly, his hands relaxed upon the saddlebow, lost in thought. About him was the silence of the warm September wood. It was a wood of small pines, scarred and torn, as were now all the woods of this land by the heavy hand and heel of a giant war. That was a general war, but to each man, too, his own war. Stafford’s had been a long war, long and sultry, stabbed with fierce lightnings. He had scars enough within, stains of a rough and passionate weather, marks of a lava flow. But to-day, riding through the September wood, he felt that the war was over. He was drawing still from that deeper stratum of being, from the colder, purer well. His mind had changed, and without any inner heroics he was prepared to act upon that change. He had never been weak of will. In Winchester, when he entered it at sunset, he found a small grey command, and on the pillared porch of the hotel and in the bare general room various officers who came and went or sat at the table writing. Stafford, taking his place also at this long and heavy board and asking for pen and ink, fell into talk, while he waited, with an infantry captain sitting opposite. Where was General Lee and the main army? “Along the Rapidan, watching Meade on the other side. Where have you been,” said the captain, “that you didn’t know that?” “I have been in prison.—On the Rapidan.” “Yes. But Longstreet, with Hood and McLaws, has been ordered to Tennessee to support Bragg. There’ll be a great battle down there.” “Then there’s inactivity at the moment with us?” “Yes. Marse Robert’s just resting his men and watching Meade. Nobody exactly knows what the next move will be.” A negro boy brought the writing-materials for which Stafford had asked. He left the captain’s conversation and fell to writing. He wrote three letters. One was to General Lee, whom he knew personally, one to the general commanding his own brigade, and one to Warwick Cary. When he came to the envelope for the last-named letter he glanced across to the captain, also writing. “The Golden Brigade, General Cary—Warwick Cary? Do you know if it is with Longstreet or by the Rapidan?” “By the Rapidan, I think. But Warwick Cary was killed at Gettysburg.” Stafford drew in his breath. “I had not heard that! I am sorry, sorry.... I begin to think how little I have heard. I have been in Prison X since Sharpsburg.... General Cary killed!”