Much later, her father-in-law came to the actualities with a sudden start. “Demon,” he ordered, “go to the kitchen and take that poor lad outside. The room is closed—this heat and— Return immediately, before you are hurt.” His wife kept crying; she was no longer fit to read a Psalm or anything else. She drank some wine and it made her head ache as always; the hours had wallowed before her eyes, wounded and bleary, and at last she was tortured by the thought which sat as a certainty in Irene’s mind: this was more than an ordinary battle—more brigades would be trotting out of Maryland, and Tyler with them.

Giants dragged their sofas up and down distant cellar stairs. They dragged them with the utmost carelessness, letting them fall three or four steps at a time, dropping the massive legs on vast boards which rang like kettle-drums. You felt the wistaria roots, the wide skein of tree roots which netted around the yard, all clinging desperately beneath the soil, shivering with a strangle-hold amid the loam which had never treated them this way before.

And then came the medley of running feet, the stoppage of artillery mouths, and confusion which told Mrs. Fanning that her garden was wrecked. Faintly above the other sounds, Irene heard a dog barking. It was Cybo. Anyone would recognize his bark, and heaven knew where he had been all day. Later they learned that the Schmuckers had shut him in their woodshed, and he escaped through a window after the retreating lines had excited him to a frenzy.

Irene went into the kitchen, and a window-pane flew apart as she opened the door. Yellow plaster spat crudely from the wall beside her and powdered her shoulder. She turned and looked at the wall: here was a gray boil which had burst within the clean paint, and it was a wonder they had never guessed it was there. They had thought this house to be solid, incorruptible, and only now were riflemen teaching them the sad truth. The boil held a bright little core of metal sticking in it; the girl touched the lead morsel; it burned her fingers. She said, “Well,” and her thin voice echoed in the oven of the room.

She went to the window beside the stove and turned back one panel of the inside shutter. There were a lot of men scooting past the farm buildings, dodging between the sheds, hurdling the fences. Two of them flung open the stable door and ran inside; she heard the old team whicker in surprise, heard them plainly through all the shouting and the pattering shots. Then the men were out of the door again and sprinting east across the garden, huge knapsacks bobbing on their backs; they had decided against remaining in the barn.