Well, she told herself, I heard a car of war coming over the hills, and I could have told anybody this would happen. Dan said there were three thousand men here last night. If three thousand men came between us as they did, what will ten times that number do to him, and do to me? Oh, at any time I would have fallen ill to see them coming, but they are a menace of the darkest order, they are poison for all their glistening and in spite of their speed and their banners—they are worse than any cancer which ever ate at flesh. Because I craved him, I quiver and lived my limit inside his arms, and he within mine. Heaven, she cried without a word, I wish you’d send one of those bullets through the window …

No—grief, not that—not to die. I want to live; I want to go away; I want to get out of this. I want to go away from this war and this town which was a quiet town, a stupid and affable place before the rebels and the rest of them came. Let me get out—crash this glass, cut my way though it, run across the field as I did last Friday, be beside him and hide in the wilderness. He said we should do it. Heavenly Father, why didn’t I go? Tyler’s coming—somewhere within these swarms he will be snarling and hooting at his men before the bullets pare him down.

She felt a sodden futility, leaden through every vein. She knew the same unwieldy bitterness which had possessed her as a child, when her mother lay dead in the parlor, and she curled in her cold bed upstairs, listening to the hushed tread of servants and the sepulchral whispering of relatives whom she had never seen before. It was a certain, blank tragedy which supplanted all other consciousness.

Oh, give me some sort of a prayer, she thought—Heavenly Father of whom I had been taught but from whom I have shrunk away! Even give me an unread book, to carry around with me as Demon carries his.