Yet those in the bomb-proofs escaped the direst of the horrors.  Above them were enacted scenes which turned even the stoutest hearts sick with fear and loathing.  The least of these was the slaughter of the horses, baggage, cavalry, and artillery, which want of forage rendered necessary, one whole day being made hideous by the screams of the poor beasts, as one by one they were led to a spot where the putrefying of their carcasses would least endanger the health of the soldiery, and their throats cut.  All pretence of care of the negroes disappeared with the demand on the officers and soldiers to man the redoubts, and on the surgeons to care for the sick and wounded soldiers, who soon numbered upwards of two thousand.  Naked and half starving, they who had dreamed of freedom were left for the small-pox and putrid fever and for shot and shell to work their will among them.  In the abandoned houses and even in the streets, they lay, sick, dismembered, dying, and dead, with not so much as one to aid or bury them.

On the morning of the 17th a fresh number of wounded men were brought into the already overcrowded cave; and though Janice was faint with the long days of anxiety, fright, bad air, poor food, and hard work, she went from man to man, doing what could be done to ease their torments and lessen their groans.  The last brought in was in a faint, with the lower part of his face and shoulder horribly torn and shattered by the fragments of a shell, but a little brandy revived him, and he moaned for water.  Hurriedly she stooped over him, to drop a little from a spoon between the open lips.

“Janice!” he startled her by crying.

“Who are—?  Oh, Sir Frederick!” she exclaimed.  “You! 
How came you here?”

“They let me out of the prison Clowes me put in,” Mobray gasped; “and having nothing better, I enlisted in the ranks under another name.”  There he choked with blood.

“Doctor,” called Janice, “come quickly!”

“Humph!” growled the surgeon, after one glance.  “You should not summon me to waste time on him.  Can’t you see ’t is hopeless?”

“Oh, don’t—­” began Janice.

“Nay, he speaks the truth,” said Mobray; “and I thank God ’t is so.  Don’t cry.  I am glad to go; and though I have wasted my life, ’t is a happier death than poor John Andre’s.”

For a moment only the sobs of the girl could be heard, then the dying man gaspingly resumed:  “A comrade I once had whom I loved best in this world till I knew you.  By a strange chance we loved the same girl; I wish I might die with the knowledge that he is to have the happiness that was denied to me.”

“Oh, Sir Frederick, you must not ask it!  He—­”

“His was so bitter a story that he deserves a love such as yours would be to make it up to him.  I can remember him the merriest of us all, loved by every man in the regiment, from batman to colonel.”

“And what changed him?” Janice could not help asking.