Then suddenly he announced that he and Frances were to be married immediately without even the splendid ceremony that might have given Patty a medicine of excitement. She wailed aloud uncomforted. She was losing another child by the half-death of marriage. “I’d like to poison the girl,” she cried, “she’ll have me a grandmother in a year! Immy’s children are so far away they don’t count. Still, if it will keep Keith from the war, I’ll be a dozen grandmothers.” But Keith was not thinking of marriage as a substitute for war. It was a prelude. The war mood was causing a stampede toward matrimony. Death overspread the horizon like a black scythe sky-wide. Terror became a kind of rapture. Life looked brief; and every moment sweet because moments might be few. The warrior heart surged with the thought, “I may not be beating long.” The woman heart mourned: “My love who clasps me may soon lie cold in death on a muddy field.” Fear grew to a Bacchanal whose revelry is fierce because the drab dawn is near. Men were greedy in their demands and women reckless in their surrenders because their world was on the brink of doom. To the lover expecting the bugle to cry “March!” at daybreak, the night was desperate with crowded desires, and the beloved wondered if it were not less a virtue than a treason to deny him any last luxury she had to offer. It had been so in every war. It came so in this. It was the unsuspected tragic aspect of that ancient farce when Vulcan flung out his steel net and caught Mars and Venus in each other’s arms; exposed them to the laughter of the gods. But the laughter of the gods is the suffering of the clods; and with war hovering, amours that had been disgraceful in peace looked pitiful, beautiful, patriotic. Keith was married on a Thursday in April and set out for a brief honeymoon at Tuliptree Farm. The next day the nation’s flag at Fort Sumter was fired on. The next day after that—the thirteenth it was—Major Anderson saluted the flag with fifty guns before he surrendered. The Sunday _Herald_ carried the headline “Dissolution of the Union” and stated that on the night before a mass meeting had been held to force the administration to desist from Mr. Lincoln’s expressed intention to coerce the seceding states. But the challenge and the insult to the Stars and Stripes stung most of the waverers into demanding the blood of the insolent Southrons. Monday morning Mr. Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand militia to devote three months to suppressing the Rebellion. Nobody thought it would take that long, but it was well to be safe.