you have gone.  My brother thought that I ought to tell you this:  it seems that he and his friend had a strange sympathy for you in what they appear to know or guess of your relations with that woman, and I think he was touched by what he thought was your kindness and chivalry to him on account of his sister.  But I do not think he ever knew, or will know, how great is the task that he has imposed upon me.

“You know now, do you not, why I did not speak to you when we first met; it seemed so impossible to do it in an atmosphere and a festivity that was so incongruous with the dreadful message I was charged with.  And when I had to meet you later—­perhaps I may have wronged you—­but it seemed to me that you were so preoccupied and interested with other things that I might perhaps only be wearying you with something you cared little for, or perhaps already knew and had quickly forgotten.

“I had been wanting to say something else to you when I had got rid of my dreadful message.  I do not know if you still care to hear it.  But you were once generous enough to think that I had done you a service in bringing a letter to your commander.  Although I know better than anybody else the genuine devotion to your duty that made you accept my poor service, from all that I can hear, you have never had the credit of it.  Will you not try me again?  I am more in favor here, and I might yet be more successful in showing your superiors how true you have been to your trust, even if you have little faith in your friend, Matilda Faulkner.”

For a long time he remained motionless, with the letter in his hand.  Then he arose, ordered his horse, and galloped away.

There was little difficulty in finding the cemetery of Three Pines Crossing—­a hillside slope, hearsed with pine and cypress, and starred with white crosses, that in the distance looked like flowers.  Still less was there in finding the newer marble shaft among the older lichen-spotted slabs, which bore the simple words:  “Alice Benham, Martyr.”  A few Confederate soldiers, under still plainer and newer wooden headstones, carved only with initials, lay at her feet.  Brant sank on his knees beside the grave, but he was shocked to see that the base of the marble was stained with the red pollen of the fateful lily, whose blossoms had been heaped upon her mound, but whose fallen petals lay dark and sodden in decay.

How long he remained there he did not know.  And then a solitary bugle from the camp seemed to summon him, as it had once before summoned him, and he went away—­as he had gone before—­to a separation that he now knew was for all time.

Then followed a month of superintendence and drill, and the infusing into the little camp under his instruction the spirit which seemed to be passing out of his own life forever.  Shut in by alien hills on the borderland of the great struggle, from time to time reports reached him of the bitter fighting, and almost disastrous successes of his old division commander.  Orders came from Washington to hurry the preparation of his raw levies to the field, and a faint hope sprang up in his mind.  But following it came another dispatch ordering his return to the Capital.