For before the next campaign opened--the campaign of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, and Cold Harbour--the North had recognised in Grant a leader who knew what use to make of the means at his command, and, more important still, a leader who clearly saw that the strength of the Confederacy lay, not in the possession of cities or the holding of strategic positions, but in the superb fighting force of Lee's army. Grant, in supreme command of all the armies of the Union, directed the work of all of them to the one task of crushing Lee, and in the end he accomplished it. When that was done, this most stupendous war in modern history was over. In all these epoch-making events the master of Warlock did his part, with a devotion that wrought a colonel's stars upon his collar and added honour to the name he bore. During the long winter of 1863-64, while the mud-bound armies lay helplessly idle in winter quarters, Baillie had Agatha with him in his log hut near Orange Court-house, and before the campaign opened at the Wilderness in the spring, an heir to Warlock was born in camp,--a child veritably "cradled in a revolution." Agatha was near her husband, too, during the long siege of Petersburg, though she could not be actually with him; for his place was on the lines, where the "scream of shot, and burst of shell, and bellowing of the mortars" were ceaseless by night and by day, for the space of eight months, before the end came. But she was always near at hand, as one of that heroic band of women who stayed and starved in the beleaguered city, heedless of the storm of huge shells that daily wrecked buildings there and tore cavernous trenches in the streets. She remained there to the end as the others did, in order that they might minister in loving, life-saving ways to the wounded, who were daily brought in from the lines on ever-busy litters. When at last the attenuated lines that had so long and so heroically held their ground against an ever-increasing disparity of numbers, were broken, and Lee ordered the instant evacuation of the city, Agatha made her way on foot to Warlock, and there, with her babe, awaited the return of the man she loved, and whose voice she fancied she could hear in the receding echoes of the cannon. He came at last,--ten days later,--and Agatha greeted him with loving looks and words that cheered him in that despondency that at first made every returning Confederate lament that he had not been permitted to share the fate of those who had fallen facing the foe. Over the mantel in that family room which in Virginia was always called "the chamber," Agatha hung up the artillery sword, the pistols, the colonel's sash, and the Mexican spurs that the master of Warlock had worn in his campaigning. "Those are for the little boy to see daily as he grows up, so that he may know what manner of man his mother wishes him to become--what manner of man his mother loves and reveres."