Letty merely lay and looked her adoration, her soft cheek pillowed on Ailsa’s arm.  Presently she said: 

“Do you remember the first word you ever spoke to me?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And—­you asked me to come and see you.”

“Who wouldn’t ask you—­little rosebud?”

But Letty only sighed and closed her eyes; nor did she awaken when Ailsa cautiously withdrew her arm and slipped out of bed.

She still had an hour and more; she decided to dress and go out for a breath of fresh, sweet air to fortify her against the heavy atmosphere of the sick wards.

It was not yet perfectly dark; the thin edge of the new moon traced a pale curve in the western sky; frogs were trilling; a night-bird sang in a laurel thicket unceasingly.

The evening was still, but the quiet was only comparative because, always, all around her, the stirring and murmur of the vast army never entirely ended.

But the drums and bugles, answering one another from hill to hill, from valley to valley, had ceased; she saw the reddening embers of thousands of camp fires through the dusk; every hill was jewelled, every valley gemmed.

In the darkness she could hear the ground vibrate under the steady tread of a column of infantry passing, but she could not see them—­could distinguish no motion against the black background of the woods.

Standing there on the veranda, she listened to them marching by.  From the duration of the sound she judged it to be only one regiment, probably a new one arriving from the North.

A little while afterward she heard on some neighbouring hillside the far outbreak of hammering, the distant rattle of waggons, the clash of stacked muskets.  Then, in sudden little groups, scattered starlike over the darkness, camp fires twinkled into flame.  The new regiment had pitched its tents.

It was a pretty sight; she walked out along the fence to see more clearly, stepping aside to avoid collision with a man in the dark, who was in a great hurry—­a soldier, who halted to make his excuses, and, instead, took her into his arms with a breathless exclamation.

“Philip!” she faltered, trembling all over.

“Darling!  I forgot I was not to touch you!” He crushed her hands swiftly to his lips and let them drop.

“My little Ailsa!  My—­little—­Ailsa!” he repeated under his breath—­and caught her to him again.

“Oh—­darling—­we mustn’t,” she protested faintly.  “Don’t you remember, Philip?  Don’t you remember, dear, what we are to be to one another?”

He stood, face pressed against her burning cheeks; then his arm encircling her waist fell away.

“You’re right, dear,” he said with a sigh so naively robust, so remarkably hearty, that she laughed outright—­a very tremulous and uncertain laugh.

“What a tragically inclined boy!  I never before heard a ‘thunderous sigh’; but I had read of them in poetry.  Philip, tell me instantly how you came here!”