"Have you no more to say to me?" "Yes, Dougl's,--'s for my little girl,--ef so be as I should foller my boy sometime, I'd wish you'd be friends to Dode, Dougl's. Yes! I would,"--hesitating, something wet oozing from his small black eye, and losing itself in the snuffy wrinkles. Palmer was touched. It was a hard struggle with pain that had wrung out that tear. The old man held his hand a minute, then turned to the road. "Whichever of us sees Geordy first kin tell him t' other's livin' a true-grit honest life, call him Yankee or Virginian,--an' that's enough said! So good bye, Dougl's!" Palmer mounted his horse and galloped off to the camp, the old man plodding steadily down the road. When the echo of the horse's hoofs had ceased, a lean gangling figure came from out of the field-brush, and met him. "Why, David boy! whar were ye to-night?" Scofield's voice had grown strangely tender in the last hour. Gaunt hesitated. He had not the moral courage to tell the old man he had enlisted. "I waited. I must air the church,--it is polluted with foul smells." Scofield laughed to himself at David's "whimsey," but he halted, going with the young man as he strode across the field. He had a dull foreboding of the end of the night's battle: before he went to it, he clung with a womanish affection to anything belonging to his home, as this Gaunt did. He had not thought the poor young man was so dear to him, until now, as he jogged along beside him, thinking that before morning he might be lying dead at the Gap. How many people would care? David would, and Dode, and old Bone. Gaunt hurried in,--he ought to be in camp, but he could not leave the house of God polluted all night,--opening the windows, even carrying the flag outside. The emblem of freedom, of course,--but----He hardly knew why he did it. There were flags on every Methodist chapel, almost: the sect had thrown itself into the war _con amore_. But Gaunt had fallen into that sect by mistake; his animal nature was too weak for it: as for his feeling about the church, he had just that faint shade of Pantheism innate in him that would have made a good Episcopalian. The planks of the floor were more to him than other planks; something else than sunshine had often shone in to him through the little panes,--he touched them gently; he walked softly over the rag-carpet on the aisle. The LORD was in His holy temple. With another thought close behind that, of the time when the church was built, more than a year ago; what a happy, almost jolly time they had, the members giving the timber, and making a sort of frolic of putting it up, in the afternoons after harvest. They were all in one army or the other now: some of them in Blue's Gap. He would help ferret them out in the morning. He shivered, with the old doubt tugging fiercely at his heart. Was he right? The war was one of God's great judgments, but was it _his_ place to be in it? It was too late to question now.