Poor Saladin was tired enough, having been out all day long; and Cecily led him carefully to the plain. Every clapping leaf, every crackling twig underfoot, struck a chill into her bosom, on the over-shadowing hill-slopes. She had played too brave a part under her mental turmoil, and in the presence of her lover, himself too easily enamoured of death. A spell greater than any he had felt was over her, breathing a blackness between her and the light. Now her ample courage was fast giving out. She saw a face in the thicket, and was barely able to nerve herself not to scream. A man, in a military dress she did not know, came forward, and raised his cap. It was Major Julian Brale, free at last to do some scouting over his ancestral acres, alone, and with hot revenges in his heart. He was sorry for her, and angry at her discovery. He apologized briefly, and helped her to mount, not without concern, but with a scornful coldness of manner which he could not help. When she had gone, he returned to the bushes, cursing the Eleventh; for he had recognized the saddle on the bay. The two forces were on the brink of battle; but he was not an expert sharp-shooter for nothing, and if he could but get sight of that thief, that coward, that hell-born villain who had taken his old father's precious Molly from him-- A moonbeam straggled in where he bent over, priming his rifle, and he moved from it into the dark. Dinnerless, supperless, much too overwrought to go to bed, Cecily Carter sat in the Colonel's empty tent. For company, she had shaken out her great silken banner over the lounge, where the firelight, falling on it, seemed to praise its divine destroying loveliness with a poet's Pentecostal tongue. Once she murmured prayerfully: "Dear Robert, dear Robert." Something not herself had bade him go, and he was gone; there was all of herself now in these fears. The little parting from him which she was enduring became magnified and abiding, so that she looked upon him slain, and thought with a sort of joyous satisfaction how under the buttons of his old blue jacket, where nobody, not even his mother, knew of them, were rose-leaves all about the open wound next his heart; rose-leaves pressed most fervently, one by one, to her lips, and laid there. Other caress she could not give him; though she was his, he was the Republic's, for ever and ever. Again, she saw him carried on a howitzer to a green lonely place. A stone reared itself before her, and she read upon it an odd inscription: _If ye seek the summit of true honor, hasten with all speed into that heavenly country._ She started up. Was her brain indeed giving way? Who had spoken? Where had she heard those words? How piercing a beauty they had! Were they in the Church ritual? What did they mean? Why should they hound her from her rest?