She kept looking at the grass. “A sword. It’s been in my mind.”

My dear—my dear—look at me! and he let his hands agonize hers. She did look at him but it was not the look he wanted; it was neither resentful nor accusing, but there seemed to be a thick pane of glass between them. “I’ve been thinking about Tyler,” she went on, and now he realized that she was calling him Dan no more—she might never speak his name again. “I am forever damned if he dies, believing as he does. Before this I had no conception of what war meant. Now I have the notion. There is war in our house … yesterday, too. His name might have been David. I guess it was.”

“Do you know how you are talking? As if you were—”

“Oh, yes,” she nodded. “Mad. I want Tyler to believe a lie; I want him to comfort himself with it. He has been in the war for two years; for two years he helped keep such a thing away from us. He helped to keep David from dying in our kitchen—kept him dying somewhere else, where we couldn’t see or hear him, for two whole years. Maybe it wasn’t just—maybe it is not right for anyone to be killed, but that is what Tyler did. He deserved better than I gave him.”

God, Bale told her, you were in love with him all the time.

“No. I desired you. That was real.” She said, “We’ve had a Confederate general at our house: he commands this army hereabouts. It’s called a division … a man named Heth, and still unconscious; Doctor Pell said he was struck by a spent ball, and it glanced around the paper he had folded inside his hat. So many officers keep coming to see whether he has his senses back, and I’ve heard their talk. That’s our whole army, over there beyond the cemetery. They all say so.”

He asked, “What of it? It just means more fighting, but not in this pasture.”

“Tyler’s over there. I want you to go to him.”

“My God,” he said.

“He’d believe you.”

“No—I don’t think he—”

“Yes. He would. He thinks you are strange—he disapproves of you and your ideas, but he would believe anything you told him.” She patted the handkerchief, and folded it again and again, and still she looked at the weeds in front of her.

Dan’s throat was stiff and sore. “How do you know he’s there?”

“He must be. I heard them talk about the Second Corps. Maybe they took prisoners. Probably that was it: Tyler’s in the Second Corps—he had that little clover-thing on his hat. You could find him, and he would listen to you if you said that Elmer Quagger had—That you and I—”