Before the battery had got half way to Virginia Hilary had written back to Anna his inevitable rhapsody over that amazing performance of hers, taking it as patent and seal of her final, utter, absolute self-bestowal. And indeed this it might have turned out to be had he but approached it by a discreet circuit through the simplest feminine essentials of negative make-believe. But to spring out upon it in that straightforward manner--! From May to February her answer to this was the only prompt reply he ever received from her. It crowds our story backward for a moment, for it came on one of those early Peninsula days previous to Manassas, happening, oddly, to reach him--by the hand of Villeneuve--as he stood, mounted, behind the battery, under a smart skirmish fire. With a heart leaping in joyous assurance he opened the small missive and bent his eyes upon its first lines. As he did so a hostile shell, first that had ever come so near, burst just in front of his guns. A big lump of metal struck one of them on the chase, glanced, clipped off half the low top of his forage-cap and struck in the trunk of an oak behind him, and as his good horse flinched and quivered he looked unwillingly from the page toward a puff of white smoke on a distant hill, and with a broad smile said--a mere nonsense word; but the humor of such things has an absurd valuation and persistency in camps, and for months afterward, "Ah-r?--indeed!" was the battery's gay response to every startling sound. He had luck in catchwords, this Hilary. He fought the scrimmage through with those unread pages folded slim between a thumb and forefinger, often using them to point out things, and when after it he had reopened them and read them through--and through again--to their dizzying close, the battery surgeon came murmuring privately-- "Cap, what's wrong; bad news?" "Oh!" said Hilary, looking up from a third reading, "what, this? No-o! nothing wrong in this. I was wrong. I'm all right now." "No, you're not, Captain. You come along now and lie down. The windage of that chunk of iron has--" "Why, Doc, I shouldn't wonder! If you'll just keep everybody away from me awhile, yourself included, I will lie down," said the unnerved commander, and presently, alone and supine, softly asked himself with grim humor, "Which chunk of iron?"