Irene had the wooden spoon in her hand and she was wiping it clean; she stood before the hell of the stove and felt it searing her face with its hundred white-hot cracks. “You’ve done your share,” she told Gretel, “and more. Do you get to your room and try to rest. I will finish this.”

Pale flesh bubbling, soaked from slim little bones, the chicken swam in its pot. She could not discern the fragrance of it; only one odor could come to her. She rolled the sleeve higher on her scorched arm: stir, and stir, and round again, and round. The wall-lamp flared in its bracket. She would keep this up, she would go on stirring chicken broth forever, and after a while the swollen skin would pop from her arm, and her own meat would season this potion. The man in the remote library began to shout once more, muffled hootings which someone was trying to stifle with a hand pressed across the mouth. Horses and wheels roared through the barnyard, then another batch; they were moving guns from one place to another.

Men drifted near the window. “No, I was mighty suspicious when he saw him laying there. He had three hits—guess he’d lost a sight of blood. Sergeant said, ‘How come you got this gun, and you a civilian?’ He said ’twan’t his gun—”

“Wawl see him thar, and he said he was constable down in that-thar town. Reckon he was seventy-five if he was a day. He tolt us he was wounded a-crossin’ the field; reckon he tolt a lie. I wouldn’t make trust with no Yank if he—”

She repeated the words to herself, the queer little camp-following gossip. Why, she recognized, if he was an old constable he must have been that old shoe-maker, Burns. He has been wounded … Steam came up in her face, cooking her eyes; still she could not close them.

The door opened behind her, and a young orderly slid into the room. The woman thought, I like the way that little lock of black hair droops over your forehead. You should not be here, lad. Somewhere there is a farm; your mother bakes peach pies, she—

“Lady, Captin says as how if that soup—”

“Yes.” Remote S-sound of the word—who said that—some dark shape whispering in a corner? “It’s been finished for some time.” She said, “Now I must go.” The ladle lay upon the table, smoking. She went into the rear passage; that door, a narrow back stairway like a turret stairs in a castle, it was too narrow for Mrs. Bedford Fanning to use. Up she went in stuffy blackness. Tiny blossoms of color burst before her eyes; she said, my mind is gathering forget-me-nots, one at a time. Cannot hold the whole bouquet.