He had always seemed to love the "ladies" fraternally, with lenient admiration, and she liked this tender little domestic trait in the midst of his unyielding gravity and inexorable stiffness. She hesitated in the moonlight with some stir of genuine sympathy, and held out her hand as she passed. He caught it and covered it with kisses. She drew it hastily from him, and Baynell was left alone on the balcony; the scene before him, the vernal glamours of the moon, the umbrageous trees, the sweet spring flowers, the sheen of the river, the bivouacs of the hills, the fort on the height,--these things seemed unrealities and mere shadows as he faced the fragments of that nullity, his broken dream, the only positive actuality in all his life. CHAPTER IX That night, so long his step went to and fro in his room as he paced the floor, for he could not sleep and he could not be still, that the Rebel, hidden in the attic, was visited by grave monitions concerning his neighbor and did not venture out to roam the stairways and halls and the unoccupied precincts of the ground floor as he was wont to do. "'The son of Belial' has something on his mind, to a certainty, and I hope to the powers 'tisn't me," Julius said now and again, as he listened. He had sat long in his rickety arm-chair in the broad slant of the moonlight, that fell athwart the dim furniture and the gray shadows, for the night continued fair and the moon was specially brilliant. Once in the clear glow he saw distinctly in the further spaces the figure of a man, watchful-eyed, eager, springing toward him as he moved, and he experienced the cold chill of despair before he realized that it was his own reflection in a dull mirror at the opposite side of the great room that had elicited this apparition of terror. He took himself quickly out of the range of its reflection. "Two Johnny Rebs are a crowd in this garret! I have just about room enough for myself. I'm not recruiting." He crept silently to the bed and lay down at full length, all dressed and booted as he was, his hands clasped under his head, with the moonlight in his eyes and illuminating his sleepless pillow, still listening to the regular step marching to and fro in the room below. Julius did not court slumber. "I must keep the watch with you, my fine fellow," he said resolutely.