Off he rode in the golden light. At sunset came marching by the ——th Virginia, going toward New Hope Church. The road ran behind the cabin. Désirée helped Edward out to it, and they stood in a little patch of sunflowers and greeted the regiment. The regiment to a man greeted back. The colonel stopped his horse and talked, the captains smiled and nodded, the men gave the two a cheer. It was one of the friendly, sunshiny moments of war. The regiment was like a dear and good family; everywhere in and out ran the invisible threads of kindliness. The regiment passed, the rhythmic beat of feet dying from this stretch of the road. Désirée and Edward went back to the cabin through the languorous, Southern dusk, with the lanterns of the fire-flies beginning, and the large moths sailing by. There was a moon, and all night, in the wood behind the cabin, a mocking-bird was singing. The next day and the next and the next there was fighting—not “a great, crashing battle,” but stubborn fighting. It waxed furious enough where Hooker struck Stewart’s division of Hood’s at New Hope Church, and where, on the twenty-eighth, Cleburne and Wheeler met and forced back Palmer and Howard; but when calm came again only a couple of thousand of each colour lay dead or wounded around New Hope Church. The calm fell on Sunday. Edward and Désirée, sitting beneath the pine tree, marked the cannons’ diminuendo. It was a hot and heavy day and the dead and wounded were on their hearts. Yet to them, too, it was fearfully an everyday matter. The time to visualize what will fall under the harrow of war is before the harrow is set in motion. Afterwards comes in Inevitableness with iron lips, and Fatalism with unscrutinizing gaze, and Use with filmed eyes, and Instinct with her cry, “Do not look too closely, seeing one must keep one’s senses!” and Old Habit with her motto, “True children do as their fathers did.”—And so at last, on both sides, from the general to the drummer-boy, from the civil ruler to the woman scraping lint, no one looks very closely at what falls beneath the harrow. Madness lies that way, and in war one must be very sane. No one escaped the taint of not looking, not even the two beneath the pine tree. Off in the horizon clouds were piling up. Presently there was heard a mutter of thunder. Edward and Désirée watched the sky darken and the big pine begin to sway. In the distance there was yet an occasional boom of cannon. “That is toward Dallas,” said Edward. “Earth thunder and heaven thunder.” The lightning flashed. The earth voices began to lose out, the aërial ones to gather strength. A wind lifted the dust and the small dry débris of grass and herb. The old pine cones came shaking down. The thunder began to peal. Désirée rose. “We must go indoors. It has the right of way now—the old, old storm.”