The coverlet was drawn up near the throat of the figure to replace the striped cotton gown stained with blood and dust, which had been hurriedly torn off and thrown on a chair.  The pale face, cleansed of blood and disguising color, the long hair, still damp from the surgeon’s sponge, lay rigidly back on the pillow.  Suddenly this man of steady nerve uttered a faint cry, and, with a face as white as the upturned one before him, fell on his knees beside the bed.  For the face that lay there was his wife’s!

Yes, hers!  But the beautiful hair that she had gloried in—­the hair that in his youth he had thought had once fallen like a benediction on his shoulder—­was streaked with gray along the blue-veined hollows of the temples; the orbits of those clear eyes, beneath their delicately arched brows, were ringed with days of suffering; only the clear-cut profile, even to the delicate imperiousness of lips and nostril, was still there in all its beauty.  The coverlet had slipped from her shoulder; its familiar cold contour startled him.  He remembered how, in their early married days, he had felt the sanctity of that Diana-like revelation, and the still nymph-like austerity which clung to this strange, childless woman.  He even fancied that he breathed again the subtle characteristic perfume of the laces, embroideries, and delicate enwrappings in her chamber at Robles.  Perhaps it was the intensity of his gaze—­perhaps it was the magnetism of his presence—­but her lips parted with a half sigh, half moan.  Her head, although her eyes were still closed, turned on the pillow instinctively towards him.  He rose from his knees.  Her eyes opened slowly.  As the first glare of wonderment cleared from them, they met him—­in the old antagonism of spirit.  Yet her first gesture was a pathetic feminine movement with both hands to arrange her straggling hair.  It brought her white fingers, cleaned of their disguising stains, as a sudden revelation to her of what had happened; she instantly slipped them back under the coverlet again.  Brant did not speak, but with folded arms stood gazing upon her.  And it was her voice that first broke the silence.

“You have recognized me?  Well, I suppose you know all,” she said, with a weak half-defiance.

He bowed his head.  He felt as yet he could not trust his voice, and envied her her own.

“I may sit up, mayn’t I?” She managed, by sheer force of will, to struggle to a sitting posture.  Then, as the coverlet slipped from the bare shoulder, she said, as she drew it, with a shiver of disgust, around her again,—­

“I forgot that you strip women, you Northern soldiers!  But I forgot, too,” she added, with a sarcastic smile, “that you are also my husband, and I am in your room.”

The contemptuous significance of her speech dispelled the last lingering remnant of Brant’s dream.  In a voice as dry as her own, he said,—­

“I am afraid you will now have to remember only that I am a Northern general, and you a Southern spy.”