The General and his staff were just reaching it.  Far down behind them shone the armed host.  The march ceased, the music—­“then you’ll rememb’”—­broke off short.  The column rested.  “Mon Dieu!” said even the Orleans Guards, “quel chaleur!  Is it not a terrib’, thad sun!” Hundreds of their blue kepis, hundreds of gray shakos in the Confederate Guards, were lifted to wipe streaming necks and throats, while away down beyond our ladies’ ken all the drummers of the double escort, forty by count, silently came back and moved in between the battery and its band to make the last music the very bravest.  Was that Kincaid, the crowd asked, one of another; he of the thick black locks, tired cheek and brow, and eyes that danced now as he smiled and talked?  “Phew! me, I shou’n’ love to be tall like that, going to be shot at, no! ha, ha!  But thad’s no wonder they are call’ the ladies’ man batt’rie!”

“Hah! they are not call’ so because him, but because themse’v’s!  Every one he is that, and they didn’ got the name in Circus street neither, ha, ha!—­although—­Hello, Chahlie Valcour.  Good-by, Chahlie.  Don’t ged shoot in the back—­ha, ha!—­”

A command!  How eternally different from the voice of prattle.  The crowd huddled back to either sidewalk, forced by the opening lines of the escort backed against it, till the long, shelled wagon-way gleamed white and bare.  Oh, Heaven! oh, home! oh, love! oh, war!  For hundreds, hundreds—­beat Anna’s heart—­the awful hour had come, had come!  She and her five companions could see clear down both bayonet-crested living walls—­blue half the sun-tortured way, gray the other half—­to where in red kepis and with shimmering sabres, behind their tall captain, stretched the dense platoons and came and came, to the crash of horns, the boys, the boys, the dear, dear boys who with him, with him must go, must go!

“Don’t cry, Connie dear,” she whispered, though stubborn drops were salting her own lips, “it will make it harder for Steve.”

“Harder!” moaned the doting bride, “you don’t know him!”

“Oh, let any woman cry who can,” laughed Flora, “I wish I could!” and verily spoke the truth.  Anna meltingly pressed her hand but gave her no glance.  All eyes, dry or wet, were fixed on the nearing mass, all ears drank the rising peal and roar of its horns and drums.  How superbly rigorous its single, two-hundred-footed step.  With what splendid rigidity the escorts’ burnished lines walled in its oncome.

But suddenly there was a change.  Whether it began in the music, which turned into a tune every Tom, Dick, and Harry now had by heart, or whether a moment before among the blue-caps or gray-shakos, neither Anna nor the crowd could tell.  Some father in those side ranks lawlessly cried out to his red-capped boy as the passing lad brushed close against him, “Good-by, my son!” and as the son gave him only a sidelong glance he seized and shook the sabre arm, and all that long, bristling lane of bayonets