She ran on to the piazza. There was no one there. The garden gate was wide open, there was no one in the garden, and she noticed, though without any astonishment, that some one had been at work in the garden altering the paths. A white butterfly was flittering above the flowers, and a red bird leaving the magnolia tree by the gate, flew, a splash of colour, across to the garden beyond. These things she saw but did not heed. She was under the spell of the guns, the sound rose against the brightness of the day as a black cloud rises across the sky or a sorrow across one's life, insistent, rhythmical, a pall of sound now billowing, now sinking, as though blown under by a wind. She sought the piazza stairs and next moment was in the garden, then she found herself in the street. Meeting Street was almost deserted. On the opposite side two stout, elderly and rather quaintly dressed gentlemen were walking along in the direction of the station, but away down towards the Charleston Hotel there was a crowd. The sight of this crowd filled her with terror, a terror remote from reason, an impersonal terror, as though the deadliest peril were threatening not herself but all things and everything she loved. She ran, and as she drew close to the striving mass of people she saw men bearing stretchers. They were pushing their way through the crowd, making to enter a house on the right. Then came a voice. The voice of one man shouting to another. "Young Pinckney's killed." The words pierced her like a sword, she felt herself falling. Falling through darkness to unconsciousness, from which she awoke to find herself lying on the cane couch in her room. She sat up. The curtains were still stirring gently to the faint wind from outside, on the floor lay the history of the Civil War open just as she had cast it there before falling asleep. The sound of the guns had ceased, and nothing was to be heard but the stray accustomed sounds of the city and the street. She struggled to her feet and came out on the piazza. The garden gate was closed and the garden was unaltered. She had dreamt all that, then. For a minute she tried to persuade herself that it was a dream, then she gave up the attempt. That was no dream. Everything in it was four square. She could still see the shadows of the two gentlemen who had been walking on the other side of the street, shadows cast clearly before them by the sun. The first part of her experience had been a dream, all that about Miss Pinckney and Juliet. But right from the sound of the guns all had been reality. She had seen, touched, heard. Glancing back into the room she saw the book lying on the floor, the sight of it was like a crystallising thread for thought. She had seen the past, she had heard the guns of the war.