A mounted officer galloped into the driveway, a private soldier followed, and the private was her brother. Now they came close. The leader dismounted, passed his rein to Charlie and sprang up the veranda steps. Flora shrank softly from the window and at the same moment Anna reëntered gayly, showing a glitter of values twice all expectation: "If these are not enough--" She halted with lips apart. Flora had made sign toward the front door, and now with a moan of fond protest covered the gem-laden hand in both her palms and pushed it from her. "Take them back," she whispered, yet held it fast, "'tis too late! There--the door-bell! 'Tis Hilary Kincaid! All is too late, take them back!" "Take them, you!" as vehemently whispered Anna. "You must take them! You must, you shall!" Flora had half started to fly, but while she hung upon Anna's words she let her palms slip under the bestowing hand and the treasure slide into her own fingers. "Too late, too late! And oh, I can never, never use them any'ow!" She sprang noiselessly aside. To a maid who came down the hall Anna quietly motioned to show the newcomer into an opposite room, but Flora saw that the sign was misinterpreted: "She didn't understan'! Anna, she's going to bring him!" Before the words were done the speaker's lithe form was gliding down the room toward the door by which the other ladies had gone out, but as she reached it she turned with a hand-toss as of some despairing afterthought and flitted back. Out in the hall the front door opened and closed and a sabre clinked: "Is Miss Callender at home?" Before the question was half put its unsuspected hearers had recovered a faultless poise. Beside a table that bore her roses she whom the inquirer sought stood retouching them and reflecting a faint excess of their tint, while Flora, in a grave joy of the theatrical, equal to her companion's distress of it, floated from view behind the silken screen. XX THE FIGHT FOR THE STANDARD His red képi in hand and with all the stalwart briskness of the flag-presentation's day and hour Hilary Kincaid stepped into the room and halted, as large-eyed as on that earlier occasion, and even more startled, before the small figure of Anna. Yet not the very same Hilary Kincaid. So said her heart the instant glance met glance. The tarnish of hard use was on all his trappings; like sea-marshes on fire he was reddened and browned; about him hung palpably the sunshine and air of sands and waves, and all the stress and swing of wide designs; and on brow and cheek were new lines that looked old. From every point of his aspect the truth rushed home to her livelier, deadlier than ever hitherto, that there was War, and that he and she were already parts of it.