Yes, the crowd is there, seething with conflicting passions.  Men with brows bent and fists clenched, yelling excitedly.  Others pushing, and eager to see,—­there in curiosity only.  And, alas, women and children by the score, as if what they looked upon were not war, but a parade, a spectacle.  As the gray uniforms file out of the gate, the crowd has become a mob, now flowing back into the fields on each side of the road, now pressing forward vindictively until stopped by the sergeants and corporals.  Listen to them calling to sons, and brothers, and husbands in gray!  See, there is a woman who spits in a soldier’s face!

Throughout it all, the officers sit their horses, unmoved.  A man on the bank above draws a pistol and aims at a captain.  A German private steps from the ranks, forgetful of discipline, and points at the man, who is cursing the captain’s name.  The captain, imperturbable, orders his man back to his place.  And the man does not shoot—­yet.

Now are the prisoners of that regiment all in place between the two files of it.  A band (one of those which played lightsome music on the birthday of the camp) is marched around to the head of the column.  The regiment with its freight moves on to make place for a battalion of regulars, amid imprecations and cries of “Hurrah for Jeff Davis!” and “Damn the Dutch!  Kill the Hessians!”

Stephen Brice stood among the people in Lindell’s Grove, looking up at the troops on the road, which was on an embankment.  Through the rows of faces he had searched in vain for one.  His motive he did not attempt to fathom—­in truth, he was not conscious at the time of any motive.  He heard the name shouted at the gate.

“Here they are,—­the dragoons!  Three cheers for Colfax!  Down with the Yankees!”

A storm of cheers and hisses followed.  Dismounted, at the head of his small following, the young Captain walked erect.  He did not seem to hear the cheers.  His face was set, and he held his gloved hand over the place where his sword had been, as if over a wound.  On his features, in his attitude, was stamped the undying determination of the South.  How those thoroughbreds of the Cavaliers showed it!  Pain they took lightly.  The fire of humiliation burned, but could not destroy their indomitable spirit.  They were the first of their people in the field, and the last to leave it.  Historians may say that the classes of the South caused the war; they cannot say that they did not take upon themselves the greatest burden of the suffering.

Twice that day was the future revealed to Stephen.  Once as he stood on the hill-crest, when he had seen a girl in crimson and white in a window, —­in her face.  And now again he read it in the face of her cousin.  It was as if he had seen unrolled the years of suffering that were to come.

In that moment of deep bitterness his reason wavered.  What if the South should win?  Surely there was no such feeling in the North as these people betrayed.  That most dangerous of gifts, the seeing of two sides of a quarrel, had been given him.  He saw the Southern view.  He sympathized with the Southern people.  They had befriended him in his poverty.  Why had he not been born, like Clarence Colfax, the owner of a large plantation, the believer in the divine right of his race to rule?