He quickly descended the stairs as the sound of trampling feet on the road, and the hurried word of command, announced the return of the scouting party.  The officer had little report to make beyond the fact that a morning mist, creeping along the valley, prevented any further observation, and bade fair to interrupt their own communications with the camp.  Everything was quiet in the west, although the enemy’s lines along the ridge seemed to have receded.

Brant had listened impatiently, for a new idea had seized him.  Hooker was of the party, and was the one man in whom he could partly confide, and obtain a disguise.  He at once made his way to the commissary wagons—­one of which he knew Hooker used as a tent.  Hastily telling him that he wished to visit the pickets without recognition, he induced him to lend him his slouched hat and frock coat, leaving with him his own distinguishing tunic, hat, and sword.  He resisted the belt and pistols which Hooker would have forced upon him.  As he left the wagon he was amusedly conscious that his old companion was characteristically examining the garments he had left behind with mingled admiration and envy.  But he did not know, as he slipped out of the camp, that Mr. Hooker was quietly trying them on, before a broken mirror in the wagon-head!

The gray light of that summer morning was already so strong that, to avoid detection, he quickly dropped into the shadow of the gully that sloped towards the Run.  The hot mist which the scouts had seen was now lying like a tranquil sea between him and the pickets of the enemy’s rear-guard, which it seemed to submerge, and was clinging in moist tenuous swathes—­like drawn-out cotton wool—­along the ridge, half obliterating its face.  From the valley in the rear it was already stealing in a thin white line up the slope like the advance of a ghostly column, with a stealthiness that, in spite of himself, touched him with superstitious significance.  A warm perfume, languid and treacherous—­as from the swamp magnolia—­seemed to rise from the half-hidden marsh.  An ominous silence, that appeared to be a part of this veiling of all things under the clear opal-tinted sky above, was so little like the hush of rest and peace, that he half-yearned for the outburst of musketry and tumult of attack that might dispel it.  All that he had ever heard or dreamed of the insidious South, with its languid subtleties of climate and of race, seemed to encompass him here.

But the next moment he saw the figure he was waiting for stealing towards him from the shadow of the gulley beneath the negro quarters.

Even in that uncertain light there was no mistaking the tall figure, the gaudily striped clinging gown and turbaned head.  And then a strange revulsion of feeling, quite characteristic of the emotional side of his singular temperament, overcame him.  He was taking leave of his wife—­the dream of his youth—­perhaps forever!  It should be no parting in anger as at Robles; it should be