"Madame," said the young surgeon, "with your permission, damn the headquarters staff!" and, turning abruptly, he strode off. "I will go and see the General myself," exclaimed Miss Parmalee, flushing with wrath. "I will see whether he will permit the Sanitary Commission to be affronted in this outrageous——" She stopped short. Her indignant effort to rise to her feet had been checked by a hand on firmly the ground, which held in its grasp a fold of her skirt. She turned, pulled the cloth from the clutch of the tightened fingers, looked at the hand as it sprawled limply on the grass, and gave a little, shuddering, half-hysterical laugh. "Mercy me!" was what she said. "You know who it is, don't you?" asked Dwight Ransom. The meaning in his voice struck Miss Julia, and she bent a careful scrutiny through the dusk upon the face of the man stretched out beside her. His head had slipped sidewise on the knapsack, and his bearded chin was unnaturally sunk into his collar. Through the grime on his face could be discerned an unearthly pallor. His wide-open eyes seemed staring fixedly, reproachfully, at the hand which had lost its hold upon Miss Julia's dress. "It does seem as if I'd seen the face before somewhere," she remarked, "but I don't appear to place it. It is getting so dark, too. No, I can't imagine. Who is it?" She had risen to her feet and was peering down at the dead man, her pretty brows knitted in perplexity. "He recognized you!" said Dwight, with significant gravity. "It's Marsena Pulford." "Oh, poor man!" exclaimed Julia. "If he'd only spoken to me I would gladly have fanned him, too. But I was so anxious about the Colonel here that I never took a fair look at him. I dare say I shouldn't have recognized him, even then. Beards do change one so, don't they!" Then she turned to Colonel Starbuck and made answer to the inquiry of his lifted eyebrows. "The unfortunate man," she explained, "was our village photographer. I sat to him for my picture several times. I think I have one of them over at the Commission tent now." "I'll go this minute and seize it!" the gallant Colonel vowed, getting to his feet. "Take care! We unprotected females have a man trap there!" Julia warned him; but fear did not deter the staff officer from taking her arm and leaning on it as they walked away in the twilight. Then the night fell, and Dwight buried Marsena. The War Widow THE WAR WIDOW I. Although we had been one man short all day, and there was a plain threat of rain in the hot air, everybody left the hay-field long before sundown. It was too much to ask of human nature to stay off up in the remote meadows, when such remarkable things were happening down around the house.