Mrs. Gwynn made the conventional polite protest, and the "ladies" joyously and affectionately flocked around him, and his heart expanded to the grave kindness of his host. Nevertheless he appreciated a subtle change. Despite the enhancing charm of the season, which even a few days had wrought to a deeper perfection, the place had somehow fallen under a tinge of gloom. But the roses were blooming at the windows, the lilies stood in ranks, tall and stately, in the borders, the humming-birds were rioting all day in the honeysuckle vines over the rear galleries and the side porch, the breeze swept back and forth through the dim, perfumed, wide spaces of the house, which seemed expanded, with all the doors open. Sometimes he attributed the change to the tempered light, for all the trees were in full leaf, and the deeply umbrageous boughs transmitted scarce a beam to the windows, once so sunny; much of the time, too, the shutters were partially closed. And though the children flitted about like little fairies, in their thin white dresses, and Mrs. Gwynn, garbed, too, in white, seemed, with her floating draperies, in the transparent green twilight, like some ethereal dream of youth and beauty, there was a pervasive sense of despondency, of domestic discomfort, of impending disaster. Sometimes he attributed the change to one or two untoward chances, a revelation of the real character of war that happened to be presented to the observation of the household. The "ladies" came clamoring in one day, all wide-eyed and half distraught. With that relish of horror characteristic of ignorance, a negro woman, a visitor of Aunt Chaney's, had detailed to them the sentence of a soldier to be shot for some military crime--shot, as he knelt on his own coffin. Presently they heard the music of the band playing a funeral march along the turnpike as the poor wretch was taken out with a detail from the city limits; then, only the drum, a terrible sound, a dull, muffled thud, at intervals, that barely timed the marching footfall, while the victim was in the midst! And still the vibration of the mournful drum, seeking out every responsive nerve of terror within the shuddering children! Their painful, tearless cries, their clinging hands, their frantic appeals for help for the doomed creature--would no one help him!--were most pathetic.