The iron voice rang through the city. Faces came to the open windows, questioning voices arose, men passed, walking rapidly, the aide and the lieutenant-colonel said good-bye in haste and went with the rest. The loud ringing ceased; it had not lasted long enough to mark anything very terrible. Judith and Unity waited by a honeysuckle-draped gate until the clamour had ceased, and then until there came reassurance from a passer-by. “Nothing alarming! A slight engagement at Drewry’s Bluff, and a feint this way!” The kinsman’s house where Judith had stayed before sheltered now the two sisters. Judith was here because, during the weeks of inaction preceding the opening of the campaign, Cleave could now and again come to Richmond for a day. Unity was here because of sheer need of change, so weary long had been the winter at Greenwood. Change was change, even if both plays were tragedies. Now they went into the house that, like all houses in Richmond, was filled with people. Of the three sons, one had died in prison and the others were with Lee. The house was murmurous with the voices of women and quite elderly men, across which bubbled the clear notes of children. So much of the great State was overrun now by the foe, so many homes were burned, so much subsistence was destroyed, so impossible was it to stay in the old home region, that always, everywhere, occurred a movement of refugees. There was a tendency for the streams to set toward Richmond; unwise but natural. Almost every quarter was now threatened; one went into peaceful fields to-day, and to-morrow one must move again. Richmond! Richmond was surely safe, Richmond would surely never fall.... There was a restless straining, too, toward the heart of things. So the refugees came to Richmond and, with the troops coming and going, and Government and the departments and the inmates of the great hospitals and the inmates of the mournful prisons, crowded the city. Judith and Unity had together the small, high-up, white room behind the tulip tree that had been Judith’s before and during and after the Seven Days. Now they climbed to it, laid away their things, and prepared for the three o’clock dinner. Judith sat in the window-seat, her hands about her knee, her head thrown back against the white wood, her eyes on the shimmering distance seen between the boughs. “Once this window faced as it should,” she said; “I could watch the camp-fires each night—and I watched—I watched. But now I wish it were a northwest window.” Unity, at the mirror, coiled her bright, brown hair. “By the time it was cut you might need another.” “That is true,” said Judith. “The sky reddens all round, and one needs a room all windows.”