The moon made itself felt, even while the western sky was pink and hollow above the vanished sun. Red spot, chasing scarlet varnish, orange spotted and speckled in the thin woods, score after score of colored blotches: fires were shining. The bugles and the horses neighed together; three thousand men were eating, boiling coffee along the entire ridge, and forever the light horse-artillery rattled in the side roads. This division of cavalry went about secret plottings in which the country people could have no part; even the tired horses knew plans which civilians could never be allowed to know.

Mr. Fanning slept quite comfortably, and much of his pain had gone away. Downstairs, his wife read the Philadelphia paper aloud to Dan Bale and to her daughter-in-law. Poil de Chevres, all-wool Delaines, Challies, Mozambiques—Pacific Lawns at eighteen-and-three-quarter-cents the yard—and all to be had at H. Steel & Son’s in North Tenth street. She remembered with approval the fine organdy lawns she’d bought the year before, from Eyre and Landell’s. Some women, she declared pointedly, didn’t feel that Philadelphia shops were good enough for them; for her part, she thought it downright unpatriotic for ladies to send abroad for things they might as well buy in their own country … Irene made no remark; she had a palm-leaf fan in her hand but it did not move, it might have been glued there.

Oh, my dear …

When Mrs. Fanning was gone upstairs, Dan wound the girl in his arms. She did not resist; they stood knotted together for a long moment, perplexed by a thousand forebodings. I wish you’d written that letter, she murmured weakly … yes, I know, I asked you to write nothing yet; it is my fault; but if you had written, or gone to find him, I’d feel that something had been done about it.

Mrs. Fanning called over the stair rail: she wished that Daniel would sleep on the couch in the sitting room, where he could hear anybody if they tried to break in.

He went first to look at his own house. No one had disturbed the place, but there were mounted sentries padding in the road, and another battery of small cannon toiling past. A sepulchral silence had fallen over the hills—a silence in which wagons and guns still grated far away, seemingly muffled in sound by the very moonlight which revealed them to the eyes. Miles to the south rose the dull reflection of other fires: more soldiers off there behind those creamy ridges. Dan wondered if they were rebels … The dead horse lay beside his gate, and the moonlight made richness out of its swelling carcass.