Yes, only in his life. Lifeless, except in its painful half-consciousness of death, seemed her own being; lifeless the great, populous city; lifeless the long lines of occupied forts; lifeless all, because he was no longer in the midst. While away down the broad river, somewhere, in one man’s bosom, beat the heart of all life for her. An unsupportable sense of suffocation, like the being stifled with grave clods, overwhelmed her. She struggled up and threw open the windows of her room for air. But it was a subtler air than any in her reach that she needed for her relief. And an intolerable longing to be near him, to be with him at all costs, seized her. She felt that she could not breathe apart from him; that there could be no evil in this world come to her so great as this evil of separation from him; that there was nothing could be compared with it; nothing could be weighed against it; no cause on earth could or need justify such a mortal severance. Without him, the fairest, brightest scenes of earth would be to her as lifeless and as gloomy as the charnel house, while with him _any_ scene—a hut, a cave, a bomb-proof, the rifle-pits, the battle-field, aye, the Libby Prison itself, would be endurable. In the great bitterness of her anguish, she repented that she had not married him, and gone with him to the field. That would have been happiness, and the only happiness possible for her. But then she was pledged to abjure his whole sex in the way of love and marriage. But if it were possible that she could have followed him to battle, followed him through life, as his sister, that would have been the next best thing to being his wife; or better still, as his brother, for as his brother she might be beside him on the battle-field, in the midst of an engagement, when shot and shell were flying fastest, in the thickest carnage, where, as his wife, she would never be allowed to appear. A vehement, passionate desire to be all this to her beloved; to be to him more than wife, sister or brother had ever been to man before—more than all these combined could ever become—to be his brother-in-arms, his inseparable companion, his shadow, his shield, his guardian angel, in the tented field, in the pitched battle, in the rebel prison, or in the grave. And why should she not be all this to him? she asked herself. There was no law of God or man that forbade it. There was no human creature whom she could hurt by it. In the midst of her impassioned aspirations she stopped short, sat down, and put her hands to her temples and took herself to task.